230 ; THE ORCHID REVIEW. | Nov.-DEc,, 1918. 
oblong than in the Military, and less lax than in the Man Orchis. The 
sepals were bordered with red, as in the latter, but white with a few speckles, 
and turned upwards as in the former. The lip was just intermediate in form 
between the two, but purple and speckled as in the Military Orchis; and, 
finally, its spur was four times shorter than in that species, but, nevertheless, 
distinctly formed, instead of being absent, as in the Man Orchis. 
‘‘ Here, then isa clear case of hybridism. The coppice contains A and 
B, natural well-known species, and no other; but among them springs up 
an intermediate form, which is equally A + Band B+ A, 
‘In this, as in so many other cases, it is to be hoped that botanists will 
find cause to make them distrust the trifling peculiarities—we should rather 
say accidents—out of which some of them are perpetually fabricating those 
spurious species which we should be contented with describing as so many 
ephemeral examples of mistaken ingenuity, if they were not something far 
more important in their bearing upon the interests of natural history. 
Let us hope that Mr. Weddell’s anthropophoro-militaris Orchis will assist 
in putting an end to so mischievous a folly.” 
The article is not cited for its historical accuracy—in which, indeed, it 
is rather defective—but to show how little was known of the subject prior 
to Dominy’s initial experiments. It is quite evident that Weddell’s memoir 
made a deep impression on Lindley, and inspired his shrewd inference as to 
the origin of Phalenopsis intermedia—an inference confirmed over thirty 
years later, when Seden raised an identical plant in Messrs. Veitch’s 
establishment at Chelsea, by crossing Phalaenopsis rosea with the pollen of 
P. Aphrodite. The seedling flowered in 1886, and thus P. intermedia 
possesses a double interest, for not only was it the first recognised tropical 
hybrid Orchid, but it was the subject of the first successful experiment to 
prove the origin of a wild plant. 
Lindley’s reference to M. Roper having pointed out a presumed mule 
between Orchis fusca and O. militaris should have been to an abnormal 
hexandrous form of the plant; the hybrid itself dates from at least twenty 
years earlier, it having been described by the elder Reichenbach in 1830-2 
(Fl. Germ, Excurs., p. 125), under the name of Orchis hybrida, Boenn., with 
the significant remark, ‘‘ Forsan hybrida species ? ”’ 
And as long previously as 1787 we find an Orchis suaveolens described 
and figured as a hybrid by Villars (Hist. Pl. Dauph., ii. p. 38, t- 1). The 
author remarked that if it were possible to think of a hybrid, especially in a 
genus which is multiplied very rarely by seed, it would appear that its 
parents might be Orchis odoratissima and Satyrium nigrum, but it might 
be only a variety. He then compared it with the suggested parents, and 
remarked that it was rare, having only been once met with during fifteen 
years herborisations near Grenoble. It is the earliest suggestion of a 
