182 THE ORCHID REVIEW. | JUNE, 1923, 
THE GENUS ZYGOPETALUM. 
. last few years have witnessed a considerable revival in interest and 
, cultivation of species, especially those having curiously constructed 
flowers or possessing other attractive qualities. Many of the plants that in 
the time of our ancestors were well represented in collections are now 
rarely seen, or at most by comparatively smaller examples. To the newer 
class of amateurs these species present themselves as novelties, while their 
correct classification is often a matter of considerable complexity. Thirty 
years ago the large Zygopetalum genus had many admirers, and the 
following information published at that period in Veitch’s Orchid M anual is 
worthy of study to-day. ; 
The limits of a genus are often difficult to define; the difficulty may 
arise from various causes, and none more so than the progress of discovery. 
A species may appear in cultivation that was previously unknown to science, 
and the botanist who deals with it, finding characters in the flowers 
structurally different from every known genus, creates’a new one for its 
reception. Another species may afterwards come to light having some 
structural analogy to the former, but at the’same time differing from it in 
some apparently essential character that forbids its being referred to the 
genus founded upon the former species, or to any other, and in consequence 
another genus is proposed for its reception. The process may be repeated 
for a third and even fourth species, and soon. This is precisely what has 
happened with species now included in the genus under review. 
About the year 1826, Mr. Makay, of the Trinity College Botanic Garden, 
Dublin, introduced from Brazil a beautiful and now well-known Orchid 
which, on flowering, he submitted to Sir William Hooker, who found it so 
unlike any described species in the structure of its flowers that he had no 
hesitation in founding upon it the genus Zygopetalum. Some years later 
another Orchid was discovered in British Guiana by Schomburgk, and @ 
specimen was sent by him to Mr. Bateman, who named it Huntley 
sessiliflora, but did not publish a diagnosis of his new genus. Lindley 
subsequently referred other species to Bateman’s Huntleya, including 
H. Meleagris, which was the first that was figured and described, and is 
thence the type species of that group, and H. violacea figured in his Sertwm 
Orchidaceum. But as these two species differ somewhat from each other in 
the characters of the labellum and column, Reichenbach removed them 
from Huntleya, referring the first to Lindley’s Batemania, and founding 
upon the second his own genus Bollea. 
Then followed the discoveries of Warscewicz in Central America, some 
of which were constituted a new genus by Reichenbach under the name of 
Pescatorea, and others under the name of Warscewiczella; and besides 
