SKETCHES OF WILD ORCHIDS IN GUIANA. 
43 
appears to be very difficult to grow in an Orchid-house, it is a most 
successful garden Orchid in the colony. Masses of it may be 
seen in the older gardens in Georgetown; and in one case in 
which one of these masses was sold for removal it was found to 
be too big for the cart which was sent to fetch it, and had to be 
divided. 
The other Orchid which is to be seen in the same kind of 
place is Diacrium ( Epidendrum ) bicornutum, which clings to the 
more exposed boughs, and seems to enjoy the blaze of the sun 
and the full exposure to the salt-laden wind. 
For many miles from the sea the broad rivers are edged by 
mangroves of large size, the otherwise bare trunks of which are 
in places almost clothed by the free-flowering masses of 
Epidendrum fragrans with its honey-like scent. Nearer to the 
water’s edge great masses of the pretty little Lanium micro- 
phyllum enjoy the shade of the overhanging boughs, and are 
sometimes bathed in the rising tide. Brassia and Catasetums 
are common. In places there are colonies of Coryanthes 
maculata, the roots of each matted together by ants into a round 
black mass. Two Epidendrums (E. imatophyllum and E. 
Schomburglcii) occur in the same places, and with much the same 
habits. 
From the large main rivers one can penetrate into the dense 
forest which covers nearly the whole country by following up the 
course of one of the innumerable creeks. 
To English ears a creek is a backwater, generally, I think, an 
arm of the sea ; but in the originally Dutch colonies of Guiana 
the word means a stream or rivulet, or even a fair-sized river, 
provided it is not one of the main rivers of the colony. Here, 
however, we shall have to do with one of the innumerable small 
creeks or rivulets draining that great primeval forest which, 
except in the few places touched by the hand of man, stretches 
with hardly a break from where the crowded mangrove trees are 
lifted on their stilt-like roots over the mud-laden brackish water 
to the highlands of the interior. 
From some forest swamp, often at a great distance from the 
main river, the water of such a creek gathers itself almost imper¬ 
ceptibly into a definite channel, down the intricate loops and 
coils and turns of which it creeps, generally in deep shade, and 
deepens for many miles, till (even its mouth almost hidden in 
