ITS HIGH DEVELOPMENT AND MANY POINTS OF INTEREST—ITS INGENIOUS METHODS OF FERTILIZATION 
—THE WORLD-WIDE SEARCH FOR RARE SPECIES-ITS EFFECT ON THE ANIMAL LIFE OF ITS ENVIRONS 
by Tyndall Bishop 
Photographs by Nathan R. Graves and Ella M. Boult 
N O flower has a more peculiar hold on the imagination than 
the orchid. Around no other has there been gathered such 
a mass of legend and so much misapprehension. Notwithstand¬ 
ing a keen interest in and apparent appreciation of the orchid, 
there is really no flower about which 
the public knows so little, while willing 
to believe so much. 
Perhaps the most glaring miscon¬ 
ception, as it is the most often repeated 
and most generally believed, is the 
statement that all orchids are para¬ 
sites, and writers add insult to injury 
by classifying them as fungi. Noth¬ 
ing is more untrue and nothing 
arouses the ire of the orchid lover 
more thoroughly. While recent in¬ 
vestigations point to the conclusion 
that certain of the saprophytics have 
parasitical tendencies, yet in all the 
ten thousand known flowering species 
no real parasite has been discovered. 
True, a large number of them, and 
these the most interesting, grow on 
trees. But it is not from the trees to 
which they cling that they obtain their 
nourishment. They are not vampires, 
sucking the sap from the branches 
which give them shelter. On the 
contrary, these marvelous plants sub¬ 
sist chiefly on air. While the dust 
collecting at their roots furnishes 
some nitrogenous matter, their real 
living and the drink which chiefly 
sustains them, is the moisture of the atmosphere itself/ 
Instead of belonging to the fungi, the tilibe 'of orchids forms 
the very highest caste of the vegetable kingdom. No other 
order of plants is so highly developed and no other exhibits such. 
a wide range of shapes and sizes with so many singular modifica¬ 
tions of root, tuber, leaf and flower. 
Their flowers, differing vastly from each other, some beautiful 
and elegant, others bizarre and grotesque, are so remarkable in 
many of their forms that it is no 
wonder that they have been thought 
to possess something closely resem¬ 
bling intelligence. 
Charles Darwin was the first to 
read the meaning of their endless 
diversity of structure. Others, 
Sprengle, Brown and Hooker, had 
caught hints, but it was Darwin’s 
painstaking study as set forth in the 
most fascinating of scientific works, 
‘‘The Fertilization of Orchids,” that 
revealed the secret of the orchid’s life 
and incidentally threw a flood of light 
on the meaning of other flower forms. 
Earlier investigators had observed 
them to be barren in the absence of 
insect visitors, but it was reserved for 
Darwin to discover how the organs 
of almost all orchids are so arranged 
that fertilization can only take place 
through the transportation of pollen 
from flower to flower. In other 
words, the countless, cunning adapta¬ 
tions as seen in their flowers are all 
means to one end. The bent and aim 
of all orchids is the improvement of 
the species, and this, with a multiplici¬ 
ty of resources, they are attempting 
through the experiment of cross-fertilization. 
““Less skillful plants engaged in the same endeavor resort to 
haphazard methods, entrusting their pollen to the wind, or dust¬ 
ing therewith the wings of butterfly visitors, even offering it 
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