INTRODUCTION. 
THE name Orchid is with most persons associated with the 
heat and luxuriant vegetation of southern climates, and our 
North American species are, as a rule, known only to botan- 
ists. Few in number, terrestrial in their habits, often un- 
obtrusive in color, almost valueless in trade, they make of 
themselves no claim to distinction in the vast floral tribe to 
which they belong; and the rambler in wood or field is sur- 
prised when told that this or that flower he has brought home 
is related to the gorgeous and curious plants he has admired in 
some hot-house. When the Island of Java contains over three 
hundred species of Orchids, it is but a confession of poverty to 
state that the section of the United States lying east of the 
Mississippi and north of North Carolina and Tennessee pro- 
duces fifty-nine species and varieties; but when this area is 
narrowed down to New England and forty-seven are found in 
the catalogue of her flora, the provincial pride that devotes a 
special treatise to this little group can be easily understood. 
My own acquaintance with this rural family was for years 
what might be called a bowing one; a supposed ability to call 
its members by name when I saw them and an appreciation of 
their outward beauty or oddity forming a superficial knowledge 
with which I was quite content until I began to make a series 
of sketches of my charming friends. Then, as I observed 
them more closely in their homes, I realized how little one 
knows about his neighbors, after all; discovered that there 
were brothers and sisters, cousins once or twice removed and 
other relatives I had never seen, and that these apparently 
