published in October 1892.
'I sometimes think that orchids were designed at their inception to
comfort the elect of human beings in this anxious age--the elect, I say,
among whom the rich may or may not be included. Consider! To generate them
must needs have been the latest "act of creation," as the ancient formula
goes--in the realm of plants and flowers at least. The world was old
already when orchids took place therein; for they could not have lived in
those ages which preceded the modern order. Doubtless this family sprang
from some earlier and simpler organisation, like all else. But the Duke of
Argyll's famous argument against the "Origin of Man" applies here: that
organisation could not have been an orchid. Its anatomy forbids
fertilisation by wind, or even, one may say, by accident. Insects are
necessary; in many cases insects of peculiar structure. Great was the
diversion of the foolish--eminent savants may be very foolish
indeed--when Darwin pronounced that if a certain moth, which he had never
seen nor heard of, were to die out in Madagascar, the noblest of the
Angraecums must cease to exist. To the present day no one has seen or
heard of that moth, but the humour of the assertion is worn out. Only
admiring wonder remains, for we know now that the induction is
unassailable. Upon such chances does the life of an orchid depend. It
follows that insects must have been well established before those plants
came into being; and insects in their turn could not live until the earth
had long "borne fruit after its kind."

'But from the beginning of things until this century, until this
generation, one might almost say--civilised man could not enjoy the
boon.... We may fancy the delight of the Greeks and the rivalry of
millionaires at Rome had these flowers been known. "The Ancients" were by
no means unskilful in horticulture--witness that astonishing report of the
display at the coronation of Ptolemy Philadelphus, given by Athenaeus. But
of course they could not have known how to begin growing orchids, even
though they obtained them--I speak of epiphytes and foreign species,
naturally. From the date of the Creation--which we need not fix--till the
end of the Eighteenth Century, ships were not fast enough to convey them
alive; a fact not deplorable since they would have been killed forthwith
on landing.

'... So I return to the argument. It has been seen that orchids are the
latest and most finished work of the Creator