

ONCIDIUM. 



Swartz in K. Vet. Acad. Stockh. Nya, Handl. XXI. p. 239 (1800). Lindl. Gen. et Sp. 

 Orch. p. 196 (1832). Benth. et Hook. Gen. Plant. III. p. 562 (1883). 



The genus Oncidium was formed out of the heterogeneous group of 

 species brought bj Linnaeus under Epidendrum by his successor Oloff 

 Swartz. Swartz knew but five species when he founded the genus, 

 but so rapid has been the progress of discovery since, that upwards 

 of three hundred have now been pubHshed, including doubtless several 

 horticultural varieties ; and of these, nearly three-fifths are said to 

 have been in cultivation at one time or other. Besides the species 

 known to science, numbers of others are known to exist in the vast 

 forests and along the river valleys of the great South American continent,* 

 where many have been seen by explorers, and especially by orchid 

 collectors who have voluntarily passed them over. The genus Oncidium is 

 thence one of the most extensive in the Orchidean family, and 

 spreads over an area as great as that occupied by Epidendrum, 

 with which, in fact, it nearly coincides geographically. In its 

 botanical aspect Oncidium is, as Mr. Bentham aptly put it, "a 

 natural genus now well known and rarely confounded with its 

 allies.^t But, as already stated under Odontoglossum, it unites with 

 that genus in one direction, and it also merges into Miltonia in 

 another, and hence it has occasionally happened that the same species 

 has been referred to Odontoglossum, to Oncidium, or to Miltonia by 

 different authors. 



In a horticultural sense, although Oncidium includes a large number of 

 species with handsome flowers of striking and even peculiar colours 

 that render them of exceptional interest as decorative plants, there are 

 many of them that are not regarded by the cultivators of orchids as an 

 unmixed gain, for whether the circumstances attending the environ- 

 ment of the plants in their native forests are too imperfectly known, 

 or the climatic conditions under which they live cannot be approached 

 sufficiently near by artificial means, or from some physiological 

 cause inherent in the plants themselves, certain it is that of the 

 thousands of Oncids that have been imported from Central and 



* See "Wallace's Travels mi the Amazon and Rio Negro, p. 178. 

 t Jouni. of Linn. Soc. XVI II, p. 238. 



