From these, the simplest forms, we pass on to more and more complicated conditions, anomalies of form and structure--devices, mechanisms, that are past belief did we not observe them in actuality with our own eyes, as well as the absolutely convincing demonstration of the intention embodied: exploding flowers, shooting flowers, flower-traps, stamen embraces, pollen showers, pollen plasters, pollen necklaces, and floral pyrotechnics--all demonstrations in the floral etiquette of welcome and _au revoir_ to insects. From the simplest and regular types of flowers, as in the buttercup, we pass on to more and more involved and unsymmetrical forms, as the columbine, monk's-hood, larkspur, aristolochia, and thus finally to the most highly specialized or involved forms of all, as seen in the orchid--the multifarious, multiversant orchid; the beautiful orchid; the ugly orchid; the fragrant orchid; the fetid orchid; the graceful, homely, grotesque, uncanny, mimetic, and, until the year 1859, the absolutely non-committal and inexplicable flower; the blossom which had waited through the ages for Darwin, its chosen interpreter, ere she yielded her secret to humanity. And what is an orchid? How are we to know that this blossom which we plucked is an orchid? The average reader will exclaim, "Because it is an air-plant"--the essential requisite, it would seem, in the popular mind. Of over 3000 known species of orchids, it is true a great majority are air-plants, or epiphytes--growing upon trees and other plants, obtaining their sustenance from the air, and not truly parasitic; but of the fifty-odd native species of the northeastern United States, not one is of this character, all growing in the ground, like other plants. It is only by the botanical structure of the flowers that the orchid may be readily distinguished, the epiphytic character being of little significance botanically. A brief glance at this structural peculiarity may properly precede our more elaborate consideration of a few species of these remarkable flowers. The orchids are usually very irregular, and six-parted. The ovary is one-celled, and becomes a pod containing an enormous yield of minute, almost spore-like, seeds (Fig. 3) in some species, as in the vanilla pod, to the number of a million, and in one species of the maxillaria, as has been carefully computed, 1,750,000. The pollen, unlike ordinary flowers, is gathered together in waxy masses of varying consistency, variously formed and disposed in the blossom, its grains being connected with elastic cobwebby threads, which occasionally permit the entire mass to be stretched to four or five times its length, and recover its original shape when released. This is noticeable specially in the _O. spectabilis_, later described. The grains thus united are readily disentangled from their mass when brought into contact with a viscid object, as, for instance, the stigma. [Illustration: Fig. 1]