56 
The Queensland Naturalist. 
March, 1936. 
(1) Flowering and seed bearing plants called 
Phanerogams or Spermatophytes ; 
(2) Flowerless and spore-bearing plants called 
Cryptogams. 
This latter group includes the ferns and Lycopods, 
the highest, to the blue-green algal scum of ponds and to 
the rusty bacterial scum of bogs and streams which are 
regarded as the lowest. 
Nature has not divided the members of her kingdom 
into water-tight compartments, but of flowering plants 
botanists have made two broad divisions which are on the 
whole readily separable; 
(a) Dicotyledons, characterised by the possession 
normally of two seed leaves in the embryo, 
and 
(b) Monocotyledons, characterised by the posses- 
sion normally of only one. 
The Orchids belong to the latter group. Now what 
separates the Orchid from other plants? Generally 
speaking the appearance of the plant is sufficient and we 
know at first glance that it is an Orchid, but from this 
alone we cannot be certain, and in popular parlance some 
Orchids are called Lilies, and some Lilies and allied plants 
called Orchids. Some Orchids are grass-like in ap- 
pearance, and even the trained botanist examining 
plants nearly every day of his life cannot be sure whether 
the specimen he sees is an Orchid or not without an ex- 
amination of the flower. 
The Monocotyledons are divided up into a large num- 
ber of families, and it is mainly on the floral characters 
that these families are differentiated. The flower is the 
most highly modified part of a plant, and hence it is on 
characters of the flower that modern botanical classifica- 
tion is built. An ordinary flower consists of a perianth 
divided into an outer layer called the calyx and an inner 
called the corolla. The male organs are represented in 
the centre of the flower by the stamens and the female 
by ffic pistil. The parts of the calyx when free from one 
another are called sepals, and the parts of the corolla, 
petals. The stamens are divided into two parts, the fila- 
ments and the anthers; and the pistil into three parts, 
the style, the stigma and the ovary. Now the feature that 
distinguishes the flower of Orchids from those of all other 
Monocotyledons is the fact that the stamens, the style and 
stigma are united into one body, usually referred to as the 
column. The perianth consists of six segments, which is 
the common number in Monocotyledons, though it is by 
no manner of means constant. The three outer members 
of the perianth are generally referred to as sepals. The 
