Of all the cultivated Masdevallias, none are so weirdly strange and fascinating as is the species M. chimæra, which is so well illustrated in the accompany engraving. This singular plant was discovered by Benedict Roezl, and about 1872 or 1873 I remember M. Lucien Linden calling upon me one day, and among other rarities showing me a dried flower of this species. I remember I took up a pen and rapidly made a sketch of the flower, which soon after appeared (1873, p. 3) in _The Florist_, and was perhaps the first published figure of the plant. It was named by Professor Reichenbach, who could find for it no better name than that of the mythical monster Chimæra, than which, as an old historian tells us, no stranger bogy ever came out of the earth's inside. Our engraving shows the plant about natural size, and indicates the form and local coloring pretty accurately. The ground color is yellowish, blotched with lurid brownish crimson, the long pendent tails being blood color, and the interior of the sepals are almost shaggy. The spectral appearance of the flower is considerably heightened by the smooth, white, slipper-like lip, which contrasts so forcibly in color and texture with the lurid shagginess around it. Sir J. D. Hooker, in describing this species in the _Botanical Magazine_, t. 6, 152, says that the aspect of the curved scape as it bears aloft its buds and hairy flowers is very suggestive of the head and body of a viper about to strike. Dr. Haughton, F.R.S., told me long ago that Darlingtonia californica always reminds him of a cobra when raised and puffed out in a rage, and certainly the likeness is a close one. Grown in shallow teak wood baskets, suspended near the roof in a partially shaded structure, all the chimæroid section of Masdevallia succeed even better than when grown in pots or pans, as they have a Stanhopea-like habit of pushing out their flowers at all sorts of deflected angles. A close glance at the engraving will show that for convenience sake the artist has propped up the flower with a stick, this much arrangement being a necessity, so as to enable the tails to lie diagonally across the picture. From tip to tip the flower represented is 9 inches, or not so much by 7 inches as the flower measured in Messrs. Backhouse's nursery at York.--_The Garden_. [Illustration: THE SPECTRAL MASDEVALLIA.--MASDEVALLIA CHIMÆRA (Natural Size)] * * * * * SURVEY OF THE BLACK CAÑON.