348 THE ORCHIDS. 
nish these species freely. But for the other class, the air 
plants, we go to the East and West Indies, to Cental — 
America and Mexico, to Madagascar and the Indian Islands, — 
and to Nipal and Southern China, and find them in the damp, — 
hot, shaded forests, here, there, everywhere, in thousands | 
upon thousands. Three hundred and ninety-four genera, aml — 
at least three thousand distinct species have been described; , 
and no one supposes that more than a beginning has been 
made. To what an extent the enumeration, if carefully — 
made, might reach, we cannot conjecture; the work is not 
only almost endless, but is very difficult besides. Tt is here 
that we meet with a fact to make the botanist stop and dout 
his own.eyes. When we have, in some cases, carefully | 
examined and described certain species, so that we know l 
their flowers and growth perfectly, we think, and can dis 
tinguish them at sight, all at once,—lo! before us is a plant 
consisting, as it were, of all these species fused together, 
_ with half a dozen kinds of flowers that we have know 
familiarly, and never saw in connection before, and never 
suspected of the least alliance, all growing comfo 
together on the same spike. - Thus was Schomburgk startled, | 
in Demerara, when he found a single plant bearing at aa | 
the flowers of a Monachanthus, a Myanthus, and a ne 
as if, forsooth, botanists had not long before settled _ 
be, not only different species, but separate genera. pares 
the British students surprised, when the same thing ‘ilk | 
ward appeared in the gardens at Chatsworth ; and, ee" gr 
when a plant bore two species of Cyenoches very unlike, a 
with other flowers whose intermediate forms completely 
nected the two. to the 
Shall we say with Lindley, that “such cases shake pee 
foundation all our ideas of the stability of genera m opiy 
cies.” Not at all. If we find such combinations, un : 
disproves former suppositions, and shows what we varie 
permanent and natural divisions to be those of si P 
ties, usually observed, it is true, but capable of being A 

