XXXIX.— ANALYTICAL DRAWINGS OF THE 
ORCHID FAMILY. 
( Orchidacea .) 
V ARIED as the nine preceding Plates show our British terrestrial Orchids to be 
in the size, colour, and general form of their flowers, they conform to a single 
structural plan. This is even true in the main for the whole five thousand species 
of the Orchids of the world. On the other hand, the Family presents some 
marked contrasts in methods of nutrition. Whilst all of the species are perennial 
and herbaceous, the majority of them are Tropical epiphytes, clinging in vast 
numbers and variety to the boughs of the lofty trees of the Tropical jungle, deriving 
much of their nourishment from the moisture of the air or the rotting bark and 
leaves alongside them, and storing some of it up in the swollen green pseudo-bulbs 
from which spring their leaves and flower-stalks. Of this type we have no British 
representatives, most of the Orchids of Temperate regions being terrestrial , growing, 
that is, on the ground. 
Among terrestrial Orchids, however, there is more than one type of nutrition. 
The majority, as represented by eight out of our nine selected species, have green 
leaves, and roots partly fibrous and partly tuberculate. The nutriment, manufactured 
in the leaves from the material supplied by the roots from the soil and by the leaves 
themselves from the air, is stored up in the root-tubercles for use in the building up 
of future leaves, shoots, flowers, fruit, and seeds. 
The Bird’s-nest Orchid, on the other hand, is, as we have seen, a type of a 
very different kind of nutrition. With no root-tubercles, and in some other 
instances with no roots even, these saprophytic Orchids are more or less completely 
destitute of green colouring-matter, and have their leaves generally reduced to small 
brown scales. In these cases, by methods still very imperfectly understood, but 
probably in most cases by the help of a symbiotic fungus or mycorhiza, the Orchid 
takes in both carbonaceous and nitrogenous food in the form of soluble organic 
compounds from the dead leaves or humus in which it grows. 
With these variations in methods of nutrition, the Family presents two types of 
floral structure. In all alike the flowers, if not one-flowered scapes, are arranged in 
bracteate racemes, or in spikes in which the inferior ovary may easily be mistaken 
for a pedicel or flower-stalk. In this Plate the first figure in each of the eight rows 
represents the floral bract. In some cases these bracts partake of the colour of the 
perianth, as in the Wild Hyacinth. With an inferior ovary, and with both whorls 
of the perianth more or less petaloid in texture, the flowers in their general scheme 
recall those of such Amaryllidace# as the Snowdrop, in which there is not the 
coronet of Narcissus ; but with three notable differences. First, the flower is mono- 
symmetric to the median plane, instead of being polysymmetric. Secondly, of the 
