CYPRIPEDIUM PUBESCENS.—LARGE YELLOW MOCCASIN FLOWER. 75 
Lady’s Slipper written of as “our Lady’s Slipper,” and to this 
day the popular names in France are “ Sabot de Ja Vierge” and 
“Soulier de Notre Dame,” names having the same signification. 
It is interesting to note how very much our knowledge of plants 
has increased in modern times, and especially our knowledge 
of the structure of orchids—the family to which Cypripedium 
belongs. One of the earliest of American botanists, Dr. Cadwal- 
lader Colden, of New York, writing, about 1744, to the cele- 
brated Gronovius, remarks of Cypripedium, “two stamina seem 
not sufficient to me to impregnate the great quantity of seed con- 
tained in the capsule.” Now we know that a mass of pollen is 
made up of innumerable grains, every one of which is equal to 
the fertilization of a single ovule. It is believed that the 
flowers can be pollenized only by the aid of insects, and it is 
remarkable that a plant is rarely found which has flowered and 
not perfected seed, and yet again it is singular that insects are 
rarely seen visiting the flowers. Dr. Asa Gray, who once made 
a special study of these plants with a view to ascertain their 
relation to insects, notes that though he found insect traces he 
was never able to detect the insects actually at work. The 
chapter of these remarkable circumstances, however, is not yet 
complete, for we have to note that the seeds are very small, and 
that an immense number are produced in each capsule, while 
notwithstanding the trouble nature seems to have taken to 
arrange that seed shall only follow the visits of insects to the 
flowers, scarcely any of these seeds grow. We may note a 
group of a few dozen plants in any one place, and for years 
afterwards, with little increase in number in all that time. So 
rare is it that we have any evidence of seeds of these plants 
growing in their native places, that Dr. Jonathan Stokes, the 
botanist of the olden time, after whom our Svokesza is named, 
was led to exclaim that “Gardeners might make the botanists 
amends for rooting out these rare wild plants in their natural 
places of growth and at the same time enrich themselves, if they 
would prove by experiment that one at least of the orchis tribe 
