88 OUR NATIVE ORCHIDS 



have no spur, while all the more common native Habenarias 

 have a spurred lip. 



These sweet-smelling white wands of bee-beloved flowers 

 are many and beautiful in tropical countries. The genus 

 numbers eighty species, of which seven grow in our tem- 

 perate limit. One in the Southern States and another in 

 California, bring the number up to nine. 



The English species furnished Darwin with an elaborate 

 and minute task in discovering the secrets of their domestic 

 economy. The flowers are so small and their mechanism 

 so complex and minute that it required a microscope to 

 discover the curious shape as well as the actions of the 

 stigma and anther; but patient experiment revealed a struc- 

 ture most emphatically adapted to cross fertilisation. 



The "Autumnal Spiranthes" was the particular Lady's- 

 Tresses that Darwin prisoned in nets, and tickled with 

 bristles to make it disclose its secrets; and having discovered 

 them, he wrote to Professor Asa Gray, his kindred spirit in 

 America, and asked him to examine the Lady's-Tresses that 

 were familiar to him. Our seer of the woods studied 

 Gyrostachys {^Spiranthes) gracilis and cernua, and found 

 that they had the same general structure. 



If one selects a young flower (Plate XXXVI, Fig. i), whose 

 trumpet petals have just blown, and peers into its micro- 

 scopic depths with a pocket lens, there will be seen a small 

 dark dot which is the end of a thin tapering beak that 

 projects like a little shelf over the stigma. Along the middle 

 of this beak, or rostellum, as it is technically called, lies a 



