instances will be mentioned in their
place.

Island species are doomed, unless, like _Loelia elegans_, they have
inaccessible crags on which to find refuge. It is only a question of
time; but we may hope that Governments will interfere before it is too
late. Already Mr. Burbidge has suggested that "some one" who takes an
interest in orchids should establish a farm, a plantation, here and
there about the world, where such plants grow naturally, and devote
himself to careful hybridization on the spot. "One might make as much,"
he writes, "by breeding orchids as by breeding cattle, and of the two,
in the long run, I should prefer the orchid farm." This scheme will be
carried out one day, not so much for the purpose of hybridization as for
plain "market-gardening;" and the sooner the better.

The prospect is still more dark for those who believe--as many do--that
no epiphytal orchid under any circumstances can be induced to establish
itself permanently in our greenhouses as it does at home. Doubtless,
they say, it is possible to grow them and to flower them, by assiduous
care, upon a scale which is seldom approached under the rough treatment
of Nature. But they are dying from year to year, in spite of
appearances. That it is so in a few cases can hardly be denied; but,
seeing how many plants which have not changed hands since their
establishment, twenty or thirty or forty years ago, have grown
continually bigger and finer, it seems much more probable that our
ignorance is to blame for the loss of those species which suddenly
collapse. Sir Trevor Lawrence observed the other day: "With regard to
the longevity of orchids, I have one which I know to have been in this
country for more than fifty years, probably even twenty years longer
than that--_Renanthera coccinea_." The finest specimens of Cattleya in
Mr. Stevenson Clarke's houses have been "grown on" from small pieces
imported twenty years ago. If there were more collections which could
boast, say, half a century of uninterrupted attention, we should have
material for forming a judgment; as a rule, the dates of purchase or
establishment were not carefully preserved till late years.

But there is one species of Cattleya which must needs have seventy years
of existence in Europe, since it had never been re-discovered till 1890.
When we see a pot of _C. labiata_, the true, autumn-flowering variety,
more than two years old, we know that the very plant itself must have
been e