26 THE ORCHIDS OF NEW ENGLAND 
this plant in Mative Flowers and Ferns, and transfer his inter- 
esting statement, that while “most of the true Orchises of 
Europe have a tuberous root in addition to their fibres, our 
species has fleshy fibres only.” 
The few who have found the Showy Orchis in Maine tell me 
that it does not bloom before June in that State, and even 
then is preceded by two other Orchids, but May is its time in 
Massachusetts, and in Connecticut, where it has been gathered 
as early as May 3d; and as we rarely fail to get it the third 
week of the month in Vermont, I think it may rightly be said 
to open the Orchid season. The Stemless, or Pink Lady’s 
Slipper, Cypripedium acaule (C. humile of the old writers) presses 
it so closely, however, that it is not a matter of wonderment 
when I secure them both on the same day. The latter, known 
better, perhaps, as “ Moccasin Flower,” “ Venus’ Slipper ”— 
names applied to the other species as well— Indian Mocca- 
sin,” “Old Goose,” “Camel’s Foot,” “Noah’s Ark” (the last 
two popular names are probably rarely heard out of the Mid- 
dle States), represents the other extreme of the Orchis family, 
and Mr. Darwin held, as late as 1877 certainly, when the sec- 
ond edition of his “ Fertilization of Orchids” was published, 
his original opinion that “the single genus Cypripedium differs 
from all other Orchids far more than any other two of them do 
from each other,” adding, “an enormous amount of extinction 
must have swept away a multitude of intermediate forms, and left 
this genus, now widely distributed, as a record of a former and 
more simple state of the great Orchidean order.” Mr. George 
Bentham, in a paper read before the Linnzan Society of Lon- 
don in 1881, took the opposite side, saying: ‘‘ The importance 
of the single character (the possession of more than one an- 
ther) separating the Cypripediz# from Orchids generally has 
fallen so much in estimated value that they have by common 
consent been reunited with that order as a distinct tribe only.” 
“The single anther,” says Darwin, “which is present in all 
