Having the gorgeous, exotic air plants of the hothouse in mind, this little tubercled orchis seems a very poor relation indeed. In June and July, about a week before the ragged orchis comes out, we may look for this small, fringeless sister. Its clasping leaves, which decrease in size as they ascend the stem (not to shut off the light and rain from the lower ones), are parallel-veined, elliptic, or, the higher ones, lance-shaped. A prominent tubercle, or palate, growing upward from the lip, almost conceals the entrance to the nectary. and makes a side approach necessary. Why? Usually an insect has free, straight access down the center of a flower's throat, but here he cannot have it. A slender tongue must be directed obliquely from above into the spur, and it will enter the discal groove as a thread enters the eye of a needle. By this arrangement the tongue must certainly come in contact with one of the sticky discs to which an elongated pollen gland is attached. The cement on the disc hardening even while the visitor sucks, the pollen gland is therefore drawn out, because firmly attached to his tongue. At first the pollen mass stands erect on the proboscis; but in the fraction of a moment which it takes a butterfly to flit to another blossom, it has bent forward automatically into the exact position required for it to come in contact with the sticky stigma of the next tubercled orchis entered, where it will be broken off. Now we understand the use of the palate. Butterfly collectors often take specimens with remnants of these pollen stumps stuck to their tongues. In his classical work "On the Fertilization of Orchids by Insects," Darwin tells of finding a mottled rustic butterfly whose proboscis was decorated with eleven pairs of pollen masses, taken from as many blossoms of the pyramidal orchis. Have these flowers no mercy on their long-suffering friends? A bee with some orchid pollen-stumps attached to its head was once sent to Mr. Frank Cheshire, the English expert who had just discovered some strange bee diseases. He was requested to name the malady that had caused so abnormal an outgrowth on the bee's forehead!