ANGRJECUM. 129 



by the older botanists in determining its systematic place, but also 

 in a horticultural sense as being the first Angra9cuni cultivated in 

 the glass-houses of Europe, and one of the earliest of the Japanese 

 orchids ever introduced. 



It was detected on the hills near the port of Nagasaki in southern 

 Japan by Thunberg some time between 1773 and 1778.* So little was 

 known at that time of the epiphytal orchids that Thunberg at first 

 referred it to the terrestrial genus Orchis, with which it has but a 

 slender affinity, but subsequently removed it to Limodorum, a monotypic 

 genus widely dispersed over the Mediterranean region, to which it is 

 scarcely more nearly related than to Orchis. In this, however, he was 

 followed by his countryman Swarz, the greatest orchid authority of his 

 time, and doubtless owing to the influence of this authority it was 

 figured both in the Botanical Register (1818) and in the Botanical 

 Magazine (1819) under the name of Limodorum falcatum. Lindley, was 

 the first botanist to bring it under Angr^cum, but afterwards removed it 

 to CEceoclades, a genus which he had founded upon a Brazilian plant 

 previously described and figured as an Angraecum,! but now somewhat 

 doubtfully referred to Eulophia ; the other species brought by Lindley 

 under CEceoclades were removed by Reichenbach to Saccolabium with 

 the exception of the little Japanese plant, our present subject, which 

 he seems to have overlooked. This enlargement of Saccolabium was 

 sanctioned by Bentham, who, however, rightly restores the Japanese plant 

 to the genus in which Lindley first placed it. J That a species of 

 Angrsecum should be found in a country so remote from its congeners 

 as Japan, is a phenomenon for which no explanation can be offered. 



Angrcecum falcatum was first introduced into British gardens by 

 Dr. Eoxburgh, who sent plants to Sir Abraham Hume about the 

 year 1813, and by whom they were cultivated in a hot-house in 

 his garden at Wormley Bury, near Cheshunt. It probably became 

 lost to cultivation for a number of years, till it was re-introduced 

 by ourselves and other firms from its native country within the 

 last quarter of a century. Besides the locaHty in which it was 

 first detected by Thunberg, it has been reported from Kiu-siu and 

 Kin-bo-san. 



* Carl Peter Thunberg was a Swedish physician and botanist, a pupil and one of the 

 immediate successors of Linnteus in the Chair of Botany in the University of Upsal. In 1771 

 he obtained a situation as surgeon to one of the Dutch East India Company s vessels, and 

 sailed from Amsterdam for the East. He landed at the Cape of Good Hope and made several 

 excursions into the interior, aud after having remained at the Cape three winters he sailed in 

 1773 for Java, and subse(iuently visited Japan. He returned to his native country in 1779, 

 and published a Flora japonica in 1784. 



t Bot. Reg. t. 618. X Gen. Plant. III. p. 579. 



