xii PREFACE 



the reports at the meetings were all on original observations. 

 Within two or three years a number of popular books, as 

 well as a number of scientific books written in English not 

 too technical were published, and now any child may have 

 its private library on mushrooms. 



When Mr. Gibson's article, "A Few Native Orchids," 

 was published shortly before his death, the libraries again 

 had an influx of visitors all asking for "everything on orchids," 

 but they had nothing to ofi^er except Henry Baldwin's 

 popular monograph on "The Orchids of New England," 

 published some twenty years ago. To the mind prepared 

 by much school training for observing birds, and flowers, 

 and trees, this running account of the orchids as they 

 appeared in successive seasons did not give a suflSciently 

 simple method of determining the orchids as one finds them 

 here and there. 



This scarcity of books on the subject of our native 

 orchids is due to the fact that no one has yet observed more 

 than a few of them. When Darwin published his work on 

 the cross-fertilisation of orchids, Asa Gray, his American 

 contemporary, made many observations confirming Darwin's. 

 Other botanists loved the orchids, and described their 

 habitat and even wrote poems about them; but no one has 

 yet done for all our native orchids what William Hamilton 

 Gibson started to do. 



He had collected and sketched nearly all of the North 

 American species that he could find east of the Mississippi 

 and north of the Carolinas, and had received many from 



