I had hoped to revisit the colony of the Showy Moccasin-Flowers which I had found in Cranberry Swamp, north of the pond on June 14th. But Merwin’s mother told me that without doubt they had been gathered on Saturday afternoon, June 19th, by three students from Williams College; she had seen two of them come around the hill by the pond about five o’clock on that day, bearing a new bushel-basket filled with these gorgeous orchids, while the third soon followed laden with more than he could easily carry far in his arms. They followed the cool mountain road over the Domelet to Williamstown, a road over which the yeomen from northern Berkshire were led to battle at Bennington, on the 16th of August, 1777. The road is seldom traversed now, and at best is rough and rocky. It leads directly from Bennington southward to North Adams, under the mountains, and indirectly to Boston. Had the storm come on Saturday, instead of Monday, very few blossoms of these orchids would have decorated the church chancel on Baccalaureate Sunday for Williams’ Commencement exercises. The fact that these students come to the Pownal bogs for these orchids assured me of the scarcity and rarity of the species in Williamstown, although they may be found sparingly in the swamps of The Forks along Broad Brook, just over the Vermont State Line in Pownal. This stream rises on the east side of the Majestic Dome, and flows down to the Hoosac by way of White Oaks, and thus enters Williamstown, where it soon joins the river. The orchids in The Forks are quickly plundered, long before June 20th, by ignorant tourists or students afield botanizing, who either do not realize or do not care that plucking all these rare blossoms will in time bring about their total extinction. Orchids may in many instances produce seeds in abundance, but why they do not reproduce more seedlings is a problem not easily solved nor remedied. Darwin once estimated that a single spike of the English Orchis (_Orchis masculata_) produced over 186,000 seeds, and that at this rate its grandchildren would soon carpet the earth; while Müller says also that his brother estimated 1,750,000 seeds in a single capsule of another species of the family (_Maxillaria_). We must remember that the species of _Orchidacea_ are not as a rule self-fertilized, as are the more abundant and common flowers and weeds, which often cover acres of swampy land and fields of waste land. Our native orchids are wholly dependent upon insects for fertilization and cross-fertilization; yet, for some cause or other, comparatively few of the ripened and fertile seeds germinate and reproduce new seedlings. Our Moccasin-Flowers do not appear to multiply in many swamps, while species of Orchis and Habenaria are never abundant in this region.