134 OUR NATIVE ORCHIDS 



human world. Certainly it is the transmuting element. It 

 is through the chlorophyl grains that the crude elements of 

 the soil and air are transformed into flowers and seed, as in 

 the world of men it is the power of gold that transforms 

 the crude elements of the earth into palaces and luxuries. 

 Possibly the plant that is poor in chlorophyl has sunk lower 

 and lower through generations till it is reduced to the condi- 

 tion of living on others; and could not adapt itself to the 

 forming of its own chlorophyl any more than a beggar could 

 to the earning of money. Some such plants live on the sap of 

 others, as do the dodder and mistletoe, fastening suckers into 

 their living cells and drawing out the fresh juices that are 

 destined for the plant's own use, until they kill it, when they 

 die with their host; but others called saprophytes live more 

 as beggars do, on the refuse of other plants; on dead or dying 

 wood underground. 



The Coralroots are saprophytes or root parasites. 

 Sometimes in burrowing among the mosses and liverworts of 

 an Adirondack swamp, one will uproot a bunch of pinkish_ 

 brown coral, and then looking for the plant will find a thin 

 brownish-purple stem with apparently a few withered seed 

 vessels on it. This is all there is of the Coralroot's stalk 

 and flower. 



It was from the coral-like, bunchy, knobby, twisted root- 

 stocks that suck a scanty existence from other roots and 

 buried things that Linnaeus gave this group of orchids the 

 name Corallorhiza (Plate LI., Fig. i). The root is always 

 hard to dig up, it is buried so low between roots and under 



