“_Flow on, fair Hoosac, with your gentle song,_ _Flow peacefully through all the centuries long;_ _To that unbounded sea, Eternity!_ _That God decrees alike for Man and Thee._” G. G. N.] APPENDIX NEW ENGLAND ORCHIDS Nature, in fact that parent of all things, has produced no animated being for the purpose solely of eating; she has willed that it should be born to satisfy the wants of others, and in its very vitals has implanted medicaments conducive to health.... Cato has recommended that flowers for making chaplets should be cultivated in the gardens: varieties remarkable for delicacy, which it is quite impossible to express, inasmuch as no individual can find such faculties for describing them as Nature does, for bestowing on them their numerous tints. Nature, who here in especial shows herself in a sportive mood, takes a delight in the prolific display of her varied productions. The other plants she has produced for our uses and our nutriment, and to them accordingly she has granted years, and even ages, of duration; but as for the flowers and their perfumes, she has given them birth for but a day—a mighty lesson to man, we see, to teach him that that which in its career is most beauteous and most attractive to the eye is the very first to fade and die. Even the limner’s art possesses no resources for reproducing colors of the flowers in all their varied tints and combinations, whether we view them in groups alternately blending their hues or whether arranged in festoons, each variety by itself.—PLINY, _Natural History_ (23-79 A.D.). Orchidaceæ _Orchid Family_ [In compiling the appendix of New England Orchids, the author has followed the order of classification and nomenclature adopted by Messrs. Britton and Brown in the _Illustrated Flora_ of Northeastern North America, 1896, without doubt the highest and most systematic arrangement according to the progress of evolution and the advancement of the science of botany in North America.] ORCHIDACEÆ, Lindley, _Natural System_, 2d ed., p. 336. 1836.