~ genera, which h 
194 
middle of the present century this funetion was performed by the well- 
known botanist, Dr. Lindley. After his death, his admirable private herba- 
rium of orchids, amounting to 3,000 sheets, was purchased in 1865 by the 
from that Lp e made the study of orchids the seientifie business of his 
e. He was speedily recognised as eer T place of Lindley, 
habit i 
I 
probably the largest comprehensive herbarium of these plants. It was 
Professor Reichenbach’s custom to spend in most years a few weeks at 
ew, and he had the ы of examining and, in some cases, of 
describing the new accession 
He was, however, in the habit of describing the shih ыс. sent him b 
correspondents from English collections in the pages of the Gardeners’ 
Chronicle, and of these, for the most part, no other record exists at 
Kew. Thus in the genus Dendrobium about 160 species are repre 
sented in the Kew Herbarium by names above ; and in Epidendrum as 
many as 2 
The defect of Professor Reichenbach’s method was that he never 
kei the pui. work of his life to anything like a comprehensive 
view. ` To a certain extent he had the clue to it himself, but when 
Duel with ‘failing health in the latter years of his life, he seems to 
have become in some degree overwhelmed with the enormous amount of 
material which he had accumulated. And it is now ascertained that he 
often described the same species more than once under independent 
names. There is the further difficulty that he was not a felicitous 
expert in the art of describing plants, and from his bare descriptions 
alone it is often all but impossible to identify the species which he had 
in view. 
This difficulty would not have been considerable if, after his death 
- 1889 he had, as was confidently e xpected he would do, left his 
erbarium to some public institution where it would be open to the ` 
inspection of those who took up his work. For reasons on which it is 
easy to speculate but for eg it is difficult to account, he bequeathed 
his collections to the Imperial Hof астана at Vienna, on ће condition 
that they should be sealed up for 25 
his singular provision ра кеты placed the “ orchid-world ” 
a rather cruel position. Reichenbach was no longer available to sind 
em names; and his herbarium was not мно: ^к to ascertain what 
he had done in the past. To this no one having an unnamed orchid 
in his hands possessed very much in the way of a clue. Nevertheless 
something had to be done, and amateurs of orchids turned to Kew for 
help. t seemed a proper part of the functions of the national botanical 
establishment to render all the — in its power as regards the 
solution и — botanical problem 
2 Kew not, as will have been ns on the whole badly equipped 
for the а. Tk the first place it possessed in fid 8 —— the 
classical starting point of systematic orchidology. t, Mr. Bentham 
had devoted two year s at Kew to the Eu Ki "the family for 
Bentham and Hooker nent Plantarum. This was published in 
1883. mte ioo hly sorted ge copious, 2D material at Kew into: 
kama dee Reichenbaeh's work upon 
various collections preserved at Кон. whieh he described and published, 
is of c available here. Moreover, Sir Joseph Hooker с e 
№ 
