TERATOLOGY OF ORCHIDS. 37 



" Can wp, ill truth, feel satisfied Viy -saying that each orchid Avas 

 created exactly as we now see it on a certain ' Ideal ty])e ' ; that the 

 Omnipotent Creator having' iixed on oi.e plan for the Avhole order did 

 not please to depart from this plan ; that He, therefore, made the 

 same organ to perform diverse functions — often of trifling importance 

 compared with their proper function — converted other organs into mere 

 purposeless rudiments, and arranged all as if they had to stand 

 separate and then made them cohere 1 Is it not a more simple and 

 intelligihle view that all orchids owe what they have in common to 

 descent from some monocotyledonous plant, which, like so many other 

 plants of the same division, possessed fifteen organs arranged alternately 

 three within three in five whorls ; and that the now Avonderfully 

 changed structure of the flower is due to a long course of slow 

 modification, eacli modification having been preserved which was useful 

 to each plant during the incessant changes to Avhich the organic and 

 inorganic world has been exposed?"* 



TERATOLOGY OF ORCHIDS, 



By Dr. Maxwell T. Masters. 



No account of orchid structure would be complete if it did not 

 include some mention of the deviations from the ordinary con- 

 formation of the flower. These are frequently met with in the wild 

 state, but much more commonly under cultivation. Roughly speaking-^ 

 they are all included as malformations or " monstrosities.'^ Some, 

 indeed, are so, but others are really illustrations of a simpler and 

 more regular disposition of the parts of the flower than that which 

 is generally met with. 



The literature of the subject is voluminous and scattered, f so that 

 a volume, and that a large one, might be written on the teratology 

 of orchids. All that I shall attempt to do in the following 

 notes is to give a general sketch of the subject, and to show what 

 are the changes that are most commonly met with. Restless florists 

 ever on the look out, as they should be, for new developments, may 



* Idem, 1)1). 305—307. 



t The geucial suhjuct ilhutiated from iisauy examples taken from the Ouciiidace^ is 

 (h-alt with ill my Veyelahfe Tcratulorjij, published by tlie H ly Society in 1869, and especially 

 in the German edition of that work, prepared by Dr. Danuner (Leipsig, Ilacssel, 1886). See 

 also Masters on the Floral Conformation of the geims Cypri[)ediani, in the Journal of the 

 liinnean Society, vol. xxii. (1887), p. 402; Orchids, Single and Double, in the Gardeners' 

 Chronicle, May .5th, 1885, p. 597. An extensive .series of drawings of malformeil orchids 

 by Mr. Hansen is preserved in the Natural Hi.story Museum, South Kensington. 



