The structure of various species calls for special insects to fertilize and cross-fertilize them. The failure to attract the proper agencies has led Nature slowly to change the organs of many orchids so that self-fertilization might be accomplished. In this way, “an enormous amount of extinction” must have taken place. A wide gap of obliteration intervenes between species of Orchis and Cypripedium, the former being the most highly organized and the latter the lowest, or abnormal species of the Orchid Family. The species included under the great genus Habenaria grow more abundantly than any other on our continent. It is not unusual to find five or six species of this genus in a neighborhood such as the Bogs of Etchowog or Witch Hollow region. In the latter locality I found four species of Habenaria, two of Cypripedium, one of Achroanthes, and one of Orchis, making in all eight rare species for a very small area of swamp-land. Soon after I reached home with my basket of roots, the front porch exhibited a long row of pots and tin cans, where stood my transplanted treasures, ultimately to be placed in the garden of a friend in New Haven. It has always been a source of wonder that Thoreau did not find more species of the Orchid Family in the conifer swamps in the Maine woods. His journeys made in July, through pine and cedar and mud-pond regions, should have led to the discovery of more species than he mentions. He writes of but three species of Habenaria, one of Ladies’ Tresses (_Gyrostachys_), and one of Twayblade (_Leptorchis liliifolia_). To be sure, he found the Great Round-Leaved Habenaria and the two Purple-Fringed species in abundance, but there is no record of a Cypripedium in his data save as reported for Concord. Species of Orchis and Habenaria are among the oldest orchids known in the records of ancient herbalists and naturalists. Both of our native Purple-Fringed Orchises (_Habenaria grandiflora_ and _Habenaria psycodes_) are closely allied with _Orchis morio_, found so abundantly in the fields of England. Pliny, in the time of Christ, knew this plant as _Orchis_ or _Serapias_, which Fée has identified with the _Orchis morio_ now known in Europe. This species is more nearly related to our Small Purple-Fringed Orchis than to the larger species. The origin of the name _Orchis_ arose from the ancient lore of classical mythology. Orchis, a son of a rural god named Patellanus, failed to observe the rules of politeness while attending a festival of Bacchus, and offended one of the priestesses with his rude behavior. He was reported to the attendants for punishment, who in anger tore him to pieces. His father Patellanus, and his mother, that sweet nymph Acolasia, sought the co-deities’ influence, who, it is said, urged the superior gods to command a flower to rise from the earth perpetuating the name and memory of their son. Thus arose the strange untamable species of this family.