About Orchids, page 140 by Frederick Boyle
<< Return to Title Details & Download141
m _Ph. amabilis × Ph. intermedia_, and _Ph. Harriettæ_ from _Ph. amabilis × Ph. violacea_, named after the daughter of Hon. Erastus Corning, of Albany, U.S.A.
Oncidiums yield only two natural hybrids at present, and those uncertain; others are suspected. We have no garden hybrids, I believe, as yet. So it is with Odontoglossums, as has been said, but in the natural state they cross so freely that a large proportion of the species may probably be hybrids. I allude to this hereafter.
I have left Cypripediums to the last, in these hasty notes, because that supremely interesting genus demands more than a record of dry facts. Darwin pointed out that Cypripedium represents the primitive form of orchid. He was acquainted with no links connecting it with the later and more complicated genera; some have been discovered since that day, but it is nevertheless true that "an enormous extinction must have swept away a multitude of intermediate forms, and left this single genus as the record of a former and more simple state of the great orchidacean order." The geographical distribution shows that Cypripedium was more common in early times--to speak vaguely--and covered an area yet more extensive than now. And the process of extermination is still working, as with other primitive types.
Messrs. Veitch point out that although few genera of plants are scattered so widely over the earth as Cypripedium, the species have withdrawn to narrow areas, often isolated, and remote from their kindred. Some are rare to the degree that we may congratulate ourselves upon the chance which put a few specimens in safety under glass before it was too late, for they seem to have become extinct even in this generation. Messrs. Veitch give a few striking instances. All the plants of _Cyp. Fairieanum_ known to exist have sprung from three or four casually imported in 1856. Two bits of _Cyp. superbiens_ turned up among a consignment of _Cyp. barbatum_; none have been found since, and it is doubtful whether the spe