218 THE ORCHID REVIEW. [JuLvV, 1908. 
of sensitive arms, often called the antennz, which stand out from the face 
of the column, and inside or in front of the lip, and act as a kind of trigger 
for liberating the pollinia. When an insect alights on the lip, and touches 
the antennz the pollinia are thrown out suddenly, and lodge on the head or 
back of the insect, and if it should then visit a female flower the pollinia 
would be captured by the viscid stigma, and the production of a capsule of 
seed would be the result. The flowers exhale a strong perfume, which 
invariably attracts the bees, without whose aid they would remain un- 
fertilised. About fifty species are known, and in some cases the flowers are 
dissimilar in colour in the two sexes. 
The genus Cycnoches shows a somewhat parallel condition of things, 
though the details are very different. In C. Warscewiczil (a plant showing 
an inflorescence of each sex on the same pseudobulb was now thrown on the 
screen), the flowers of both sexes are green, but the males are borne ina 
_ long pendulous raceme, and are small, with rather membranous sepals and 
petals, and the lip reduced to a small circular disc with radiating teeth round 
the margin. The ovary is undeveloped, and the column is long, slender 
and curved, and the anther present, but not the stigma or column wings. 
It is from the character of the male column that the genus takes its name— 
literally ‘‘swan’s neck.” The females are borne in a short raceme or cluster, 
are large, few in number, with very fleshy sepals and petals, while the lip is 
also large and very fleshy. The ovary is stout, and the column short and 
stout, with the stigma well developed, anda pair of fleshy column wings, 
but the anther suppressed or only rudimentary. In the case of the allied C. 
Egertonianum the female flowers are green, but the males dark purple. 
This is the species which created such excitement many years ago, and 
which is depicted in the last plate of Mr. Bateman’s big book (Orch. Mex. 
and Guat.), which is remarkable for showing the males of two different 
species on the same pseudobulb. The phenomenon was not understood for 
many years, but when the mystery about Catasetum was cleared up, and it 
was realised that the different kinds of flowers of Cycnoches also represented 
sexual differences, the anomalous character of this plate became apparent, 
and this led to the discovery that the green flowers depicted had been 
restored from shrivelled females of C. Egertonianum, evidently with the 
help of an earlier plate representing the male flowers of C. ventricosum. 
It is curious that the two species even belong to distinct sections of the 
genus. [A photographic illustration of this plate, and the history of the 
question were given at pp. 337-340 of the last volume of this work]. It 
would be interesting to trace the successive steps to which such extreme 
floral diversity between the sexes has been attained, but it is a very signi- 
ficant fact that it does not apply to the whole genus. In C. ventricosum, 
the original C. Loddigesii, the well-known C. chlorochilum, and two of 
