24 
ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS. 
pervading their flowers. Some of them diffuse a very mild 
and pleasant odor, some none at all, others a highly fetid odor. 
The roots of the orchis are fibrous, accompanied by one or 
more round or elongated bulbs; in some species they are pal- 
mate or digitate. The stalk of the orchis issues from a tuber 
which nourishes it, and by consequent gradual exhaustion be- 
comes withered. But in proportion as the stalk begins to 
spring out from the tuber, it sets off, between several simple 
radicles, a new tuber, which increases in size and outlives the 
stem as well as parent tuber, so as to propagate the species. 
The withered tuber continuing to exist, while its successor, 
for the following year, is in process of developement, causes 
the number to be double during nearly all the time of vege- 
tation. 
The species from which salep has been most commonly 
obtained are the Orchis mascula, pyramidalis, latifolia, 
maculata, morio, conopsea, hircina,fusca, and others, but 
principally from the first mentioned of these, which is the 
most abundant. Independently of these, the Ophrys anthro- 
pophora, apifera, arachnitis, &c, likewise produce it. 
Salep, as we receive it, is exhibited in the form of small 
masses, resembling pebbles, strung together, from the size of 
a grain of coffee to an almond, ovoid in shape, of a yellowish- 
white or gray color, sometimes semi-transparent, and of a 
horn-like fracture. These masses are so very hard as to be with 
difficulty reduced to powder. The powder is grayish-white, 
and gifted with a feeble odor, somewhat like melilot. In taste 
it is like gum tragacanth, sometimes slightly saltish. These 
physical characters which give it so much the appearance of 
a gum, are reasons why salep was not supposed, for a long 
time, to be a root, until attention was drawn towards it by 
Matthieu de Dombasle, Geoffroy, Retzius, and other 
contemporaneous writers, who succeeded by experiments 
upon the Orchis indigenous to France, in discovering a me- 
thod of preparing the bulbs in such a manner as to render 
them identical with Oriental salep, and thereby established 
the possibility of its culture in France with advantage. The 
