xiv PREFACE 



effort fulfilled, its life question answered, it stands old and 

 stricken in days, silently scattering its seed for the year to 

 come. 



The text to accompany the illustrations has been plainly 

 set forth in simple English from Mr. Gibson's notes, from 

 the undescriptive statistics of manuals of botany and from 

 an intimate acquaintance with the wild orchids themselves. 

 It is hoped that others may make the observations on their 

 insect visitors that he had prepared himself to make. The 

 orchids should no longer be a mere Latin-named family of 

 plants to squeeze to death in a press and to mount in withered 

 array in a herbarium, but a group of individuals living in a 

 social relation to the insect world and worthy of the most 

 intimate acquaintance and observation. 



To older botanists who are accustomed to call the Rattle- 

 snake Plantain "Goodyera," and the Lady's-Tresses' 

 "Spiranthes," it may seem like ^n innovation to use the 

 names Peramium and Gyrostachys. But the latter, as well 

 as all the scientific names here appended to the popular 

 titles, are the old, true names. 



Botanists in Europe decided in 1867, at the Paris Botani- 

 cal Congress, to let the original name of the genus stand. 

 The date to which they decided to go back was the year of 

 the publication of Linnaeus's "Genera Plantarum," 1753. 

 Since that date there had arisen great confusion by giving 

 new names in America as well as all over the world to plants 

 that were already known in Europe, or by making a new 

 genus out of some species that should have been put in a 



