THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
39 
popular belief was also recognized by Shakespeare when Banquo, 
after the uncanny vistation of the ''weird sisters," asks fearfully 
and wonderingly of Macbeth, ''Were such things here as we do 
speak about ? Or have we eaten on the insane root that takes the 
reason prisoner?" In "Othello," he says, "Not poppy, nor man- 
dragora nor all the drowsy syrups of the world shall ever med- 
icine thee to that sweet sleep which thou owedst yesterday." — 
California Floriculturist. 
ORCHIDS AND THEIR INSECT SPONSORS. 
Prior to Darwin's time the flower was a voice in the wilderness, 
heard only in faintest whispers, and by the few. But since his 
day they have bloomed with fresher color and more convincing 
perfume. Science brought us their message. Demoralizing as 
it certainly was to humanity's past ideals, philosophic, theologic, 
and poetic, it bore the spirit of absolute conviction, and must be 
heard. What a contrast this winged botany of to-day to that of 
a hundred years ago ! The great Linnaeus would doubtless have 
claimed to know the orchid, which perhaps he named. Indeed, 
did he not know it to the core of its physical, if not of its physio- 
logical being? But could he have solved the riddle of the orchid's 
persistent refusal to set a pod in the conservatory? Could he 
have divined why the orchid blossom continues in bloom for 
weeks and weeks in this artificial glazed tropic — perhaps weeks 
longer than its more fortunate fellows left behind in their native 
haunts — and then only to wither and perish without requital ? 
Know the orchid? — without the faintest idea of the veritable di- 
vorce which its kidnapping had involved. 
Thanks to the new dispensation, we may indeed claim a deeper 
sympathy with the flower than is implied in a mere recognition ol 
its pretty face. We know that this orchid is but the half of itself 
as it were; that its color, its form, however eccentric and incom- 
prehensible, its twisted inverted position on its individual stalk- 
like ovary, its slender nectary, its carefully concealed pollen — all 
are anticipations of an insect complement, a long-tongued nig;-ht- 
moth perhaps, with whose life its own is mysteriously linked 
