﻿THE ORCHID REVIEW. 



[March, t 9 o 4 . 



cracking of the rifles. I have been tied down by my Consular duties, and 

 also by having to rebuild the house on my country estate; but the latter 

 •will soon be finished now, and then I shall be able to roam over hill and 

 valley again, and look up some of the many pretty things which I would like 

 to get into European gardens, especially my discoveries in Masdevallias, most 

 of which are as yet undescnbed, for I am an enemy of making new species, 

 and this often leads me to the other extreme. How careful and slow I am 

 before I publish a new species you may derive from the fact that I have in 

 my herbarium not fewer than about forty-two species of Masdevallia, all 

 with drawings and detailed descriptions, which I am sure are new, many 

 • quite extraordinary in construction, of which I have not published one. 

 But I would like to get some of them into gardens." Among those 

 introduced by him are enumerated, M. ventricularia and its variety 

 longicaudata, M. trinema (Lowii), M. angulata and its showy ally, M. 

 burfordiensis, M. deorsa, M. Lehmanni, M. Tubeana, and M. rosea. The 

 last-named plant Mr. Lehmann considered his hardest task, for in 1880, 

 when travel was more difficult than it is now, he, after great privations, 

 reached its habitat at a very high elevation near Loxa, in Ecuador. The 

 plant, which had been known from the time it was discovered by Hartweg 

 in 1842, was successfully collected and packed ; but all sorts of expedients 

 had to be resorted to, to preserve a part of the specimens while passing 

 through the hot villages to the port. Once shipped the trouble did not 

 end, for although daily tended by their collector the stock got smaller, and 

 finally the Para, by which Mr. Lehmann was bringing them, got wrecked 

 off St. Michael, Azores. But at the risk of his own life Mr. Lehmann got 

 some of the plants off alive, and landed them in England. 



Respecting his collection, it is added that numerous specimens will be 

 found in the all-absorbing Reichenbachian Herbarium : others are in the 

 Boissier Herbarium, at Chambesy, near Geneva ; and another set, nearly if 

 not quite as complete, is in the Natural History Museum at South 

 Kensington. Many of his plants have lately gone to Berlin, and the 

 remainder, which are still at Popayan, will also be sent there. The notice 

 As accompanied by an excellent portrait. 



VARIATION OF L^LIA ANCEPS. 



A curious case of variation in Laelia anceps, in the collection of Jeremiah 

 Colman, Esq., Gatton Park, Reigate, is recorded by Mr. W. P. Bound 

 (Gard. Chron., 1904, i, p. 100), as follows : — " Soon after my taking charge 

 of the Orchids at Gatton, in January, 1900, a specimen plant labelled Laelia 

 anceps Sanderiana flowered, and the flowers had no colour on the front of the 

 lip. I was told that previously it had always showed the blotch of colour 



