there is no room to deal with this great subject historically, scientifically, or even practically, in the space of a chapter. i am an enthusiast, and i hold some strong views, but this is not the place to urge them. it is my purpose to ramble on, following thoughts as they arise, yet with a definite aim. the skilled reader will find nothing to criticize, i hope, and the indifferent, something to amuse.

those amiable theorists who believe that the resources of nature, if they be rightly searched, are able to supply every wholesome want the fancy of man conceives, have a striking instance in the case of orchids. at the beginning of this century, the science of floriculture, so far as it went, was at least as advanced as now. under many disadvantages which we escape—the hot-air flue especially, and imperfect means of ventilation—our fore-fathers grew the plants known to them quite as well as we do. many tricks have been discovered since, but for lasting success assuredly our systems are no improvement. men interested in such matters began to long for fresh fields, and they knew where to look. linn?us had told them something of exotic orchids in 1763, though his knowledge was gained through dried specimens and drawings. one bulb, indeed—we spare the name—showed life on arrival, had been planted, and had flowered thirty years before, as mr. castle shows. thus horticulturists became aware, just when the information was most welcome, that a large family of plants unknown awaited their attention; plants quite new, of strangest form, of mysterious habits, and beauty incomparable. their notions were vague as yet, but the fascination of the subject grew from year to year. whilst several hundred species were described in books, the number in cultivation, including all those gathered by sir joseph banks, and our native kinds, was only fifty. kew boasted no more than one hundred and eighteen in 1813; amateurs still watched in timid and breathless hope.

gradually they came to see that the new field was open, and they entered with a rush. in 1830 a number of collections still famous in the legends of the mystery are found complete. at the orchid conference, mr. o'brien expressed a "fear that we could not now match some of the specimens mentioned at the exhibitions of the horticultural society in chiswick gardens between 1835 and 1850;" and extracts which he gave from reports confirm this suspicion. the number of species cultivated at that time was comparatively small. people grew magnificent "specimens" in place of many handsome pots. we read of things amazing to the experience of forty years later. among the contributions of mrs. lawrence, mother to our "chief," sir trevor, was an aerides with thirty to forty flower spikes; a cattleya with twenty spikes; an epidendrum bicornutum, difficult to keep alive, much more to bloom, until the last few years, with "many spikes;" an oncidium, "bearing a head of golden flowers four feet across." giants dwelt in our greenhouses then.

so the want of enthusiasts was satisfied. in 1852 mr. b.s. williams could venture to publish "orchids for the million," a hand-book of world-wide fame under the title it presently assumed, "the orchid grower's manual." an occupation or amusement the interest of which grows year by year had been discovered. all who took trouble to examine found proof visible that these masterworks of nature could be transplanted and could be made to flourish in our dull climate with a regularity and a certainty unknown to them at home. the difficulties of their culture were found to be a myth—we speak generally, and this point must be mentioned again. the "million" did not yet heed mr. williams' invitation, but the ten thousand did, heartily.

i take it that orchids meet a craving of the cultured soul which began to be felt at the moment when kindly powers provided means to satisfy it. people of taste, unless i err, are tiring of those conventional forms in which beauty has been presented in all past generations. it may be an unhealthy sentiment, it may be absurd, but my experience is that it exists and must be taken into account. a picture, a statue, a piece of china, any work of art, is eternally the same, however charming. the most one can do is to set it in different positions, different lights. théophile gautier declared in a moment of frank impatience that if the transfiguration hung in his study, he would assuredly find blemishes therein after awhile—quite fanciful and baseless, as he knew, but such, nevertheless, as would drive him to distraction presently. i entertain a notion, which may appear very odd to some, that gautier's influence on the ?sthetic class of men has been more vigorous than that of any other teacher; thousands who never read a line of his writing are unconsciously inspired by him. the feeling that gave birth to his protest nearly two generations since is in the air now. those who own a collection of art, those who have paid a great sum for pictures, will not allow it, naturally. as a rule, indeed, a man looks at his fine things no more than at his chairs and tables. but he who is best able to appreciate good work, and loves it best when he sees it, is the one who grows restless when it stands constantly before him.

"oh, that those lips had language!" cried cowper. "oh, that those lovely figures would combine anew—change their light—do anything, anything!" cries the ?sthete after awhile. "oh, that the wind would rise upon that glorious sea; the summer green would fade to autumn yellow; that night would turn to day, clouds to sunshine, or sunshine to clouds." but the littera scripta manet—the stroke of the brush is everlasting. apollo always bends the bow in marble. one may read a poem till it is known by heart, and in another second the familiar words strike fresh upon the ear. painters lay a canvas aside, and presently come to it, as they say, with a new eye; but a purchaser once seized with this desperate malady has no such refuge. after putting his treasure away for years, at the first glance all his satiety returns. i myself have diagnosed a case where a fine drawing by ger?me grew to be a veritable incubus. it is understood that the market for pictures is falling yearly. i believe that the growth of this dislike to the eternal stillness of a painted scene is a chief cause of the disaster. it operates among the best class of patrons.

for such men orchids are a blessed relief. fancy has not conceived such loveliness, complete all round, as theirs—form, colour, grace, distribution, detail, and broad effect. somewhere, years ago—in italy perhaps, but i think at the taylor institution, oxford—i saw the drawings made by rafaelle for leo x. of furniture and decoration in his new palace; be it observed in parenthesis, that one who has not beheld the master's work in this utilitarian style of art has but a limited understanding of his supremacy. among them were idealizations of flowers, beautiful and marvellous as fairyland, but compared with the glory divine that dwells in a garland of odontoglossum alexandr?, artificial, earthy. illustrations of my meaning are needless to experts, and to others words convey no idea. but on the table before me now stands a wreath of oncidium crispum which i cannot pass by. what colourist would dare to mingle these lustrous browns with pale gold, what master of form could shape the bold yet dainty waves and crisps and curls in its broad petals, what human imagination could bend the graceful curve, arrange the clustering masses of its bloom? all beauty that the mind can hold is there—the quintessence of all charm and fancy. were i acquainted with an atheist who, by possibility, had brain and feeling, i would set that spray before him and await reply. if solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like a lily of the field, the angels of heaven have no vesture more ethereal than the flower of the orchid. let us take breath.

many persons indifferent to gardening—who are repelled, indeed, by its prosaic accompaniments, the dirt, the manure, the formality, the spade, the rake, and all that—love flowers nevertheless. for such these plants are more than a relief. observe my oncidium. it stands in a pot, but this is only for convenience—a receptacle filled with moss. the long stem feathered with great blossoms springs from a bare slab of wood. no mould nor peat surrounds it; there is absolutely nothing save the roots that twine round their support, and the wire that sustains it in the air. it asks no attention beyond its daily bath. from the day i tied it on that block last year—reft from home and all its pleasures, bought with paltry silver at stevens' auction rooms—i have not touched it save to dip and to replace it on its hook. when the flowers fade, thither it will return, and grow and grow, please heaven, until next summer it rejoices me again; and so, year by year, till the wood rots. then carefully i shall transfer it to a larger perch and resume. probably i shall sever the bulbs without disturbing them, and in seasons following two spikes will push—then three, then a number, multiplying and multiplying when my remotest posterity is extinct. that is, so nature orders it; whether my descendants will be careful to allow her fair play depends on circumstances over which i have not the least control.

for among their innumerable claims to a place apart among all things created, orchids may boast immortality. said sir trevor lawrence, in the speech which opened our famous congress, 1885: "i do not see, in the case of most of them, the least reason why they should ever die. the parts of the orchide? are annually reproduced in a great many instances, and there is really no reason they should not live for ever unless, as is generally the case with them in captivity, they be killed by errors in cultivation." sir trevor was addressing an assemblage of authorities—a parterre of kings in the empire of botany—or he might have enlarged upon this text.

the epiphytal orchid, to speak generally, and to take the simple form, is one body with several limbs, crowned by one head. its circulation pulsates through the whole, less and less vigorously, of course, in the parts that have flowered, as the growing head leaves them behind. at some age, no doubt, circulation fails altogether in those old limbs, but experience does not tell me distinctly as yet in how long time the worn-out bulbs of an oncidium or a cattleya, for example, would perish by natural death. one may cut them off when apparently lifeless, even beginning to rot, and under proper conditions—it may be a twelvemonth after—a tiny green shoot will push from some "eye," withered and invisible, that has slept for years, and begin existence on its own account. thus, i am not old enough as an orchidacean to judge through how many seasons these plants will maintain a limb apparently superfluous. their charming disposition is characterized above all things by caution and foresight. they keep as many strings to their bow, as many shots in their locker, as may be, and they keep them as long as possible. the tender young head may be nipped off by a thousand chances, but such mishaps only rouse the indomitable thing to replace it with two, or even more. beings designed for immortality are hard to kill.

among the gentle forms of intellectual excitement i know not one to compare with the joy of restoring a neglected orchid to health. one may buy such for coppers—rare species, too—of a size and a "potentiality" of display which the dealers would estimate at as many pounds were they in good condition on their shelves. i am avoiding names and details, but it will be allowed me to say, in brief, that i myself have bought more than twenty pots for five shillings at the auction-rooms, not twice nor thrice either. one half of them were sick beyond recovery, some few had been injured by accident, but by far the greater part were victims of ignorance and ill-treatment which might still be redressed. orchids tell their own tale, whether of happiness or misery, in characters beyond dispute. mr. o'brien alleged, indeed, before the grave and experienced signors gathered in conference, that "like the domestic animals, they soon find out when they are in hands that love them. with such a guardian they seem to be happy, and to thrive, and to establish an understanding, indicating to him their wants in many important matters as plainly as though they could speak." and the laugh that followed this statement was not derisive. he who glances at the endless tricks, methods, and contrivances devised by one or other species to serve its turn may well come to fancy that orchids are reasoning things.

at least, many keep the record of their history in form unmistakable. here is a cattleya which i purchased last autumn, suspecting it to be rare and valuable, though nameless; i paid rather less than one shilling. the poor thing tells me that some cruel person bought it five years ago—an imported piece, with two pseudo-bulbs. they still remain, towering like columns of old-world glory above an area of shapeless ruin. to speak in mere prose—though really the conceit is not extravagant—these fine bulbs, grown in their native land, of course, measure eight inches high by three-quarters of an inch diameter. in the first season, that malheureux reduced their progeny to a stature of three and a half inches by the foot-rule; next season, to two inches; the third, to an inch and a half. by this time the patient creature had convinced itself that there was something radically wrong in the circumstances attending its normal head, and tried a fresh departure from the stock—a "back growth," as we call it, after the fashion i have described. in the third year then, there were two heads. in the fourth year, the chief of them had dwindled to less than one inch and the thickness of a straw, while the second struggled into growth with pain and difficulty, reached the size of a grain of wheat, and gave it up. needless to say that the wicked and unfortunate proprietor had not seen trace of a bloom. then at length, after five years' torment, he set it free, and i took charge of the wretched sufferer. forthwith he began to show his gratitude, and at this moment—the summer but half through—his leading head has regained all the strength lost in three years, while the back growth, which seemed dead, outtops the best bulb my predecessor could produce.

and i have perhaps a hundred in like case, cripples regaining activity, victims rescued on their death-bed. if there be a placid joy in life superior to mine, as i stroll through my houses of a morning, much experience of the world in many lands and many circumstances has not revealed it to me. and any of my readers can attain it, for—in no conventional sense—i am my own gardener; that is to say, no male being ever touches an orchid of mine.

one could hardly cite a stronger argument to demolish the superstitions that still hang around this culture. if a busy man, journalist, essayist, novelist, and miscellaneous littérateur, who lives by his pen, can keep many hundreds of orchids in such health that he is proud to show them to experts—with no help whatsoever beyond, in emergency, that which ladies of his household, or a woman-servant give—if he can do this, assuredly the pursuit demands little trouble and little expense. i am not to lay down principles of cultivation here, but this must be said: orchids are indifferent to detail. there lies a secret. secure the general conditions necessary for their well-doing, and they will gratefully relieve you of further anxiety; neglect those general conditions, and no care will reconcile them. the gentleman who reduced my cattleya to such straits gave himself vast pains, it is likely, consulted no end of books, did all they recommend; and now declares that orchids are unaccountable. it is just the reverse. no living things follow with such obstinate obedience a few most simple laws; no machine produces its result more certainly, if one comply with the rules of its being.

this is shown emphatically by those cases which we do not clearly understand; i take for example the strangest, as is fitting. some irreverent zealots have hailed the phal?nopsis as queen of flowers, dethroning our venerable rose. i have not to consider the question of allegiance, but decidedly this is, upon the whole, the most interesting of all orchids in the cultivator's point of view. for there are some genera and many species that refuse his attentions more or less stubbornly—in fact, we do not yet know how to woo them. but the phal?nopsis is not among them. it gives no trouble in the great majority of cases. for myself, i find it grow with the calm complacency of the cabbage. yet we are all aware that our success is accidental, in a measure. the general conditions which it demands are fulfilled, commonly, in any stove where east indian plants flourish; but from time to time we receive a vigorous hint that particular conditions, not always forthcoming, are exacted by phal?nopsis. many legends on this theme are current; i may cite two, notorious and easily verified. the authorities at kew determined to build a special house for the genus, provided with every comfort which experience or scientific knowledge could suggest. but when it was opened, six or eight years ago, not a phal?nopsis of all the many varieties would grow in it; after vain efforts, mr. thiselton dyer was obliged to seek another use for the building, which is now employed to show plants in flower. sir trevor lawrence tells how he laid out six hundred pounds for the same object with the same result. and yet one may safely reckon that this orchid does admirably in nine well-managed stoves out of ten, and fairly in nineteen out of twenty. nevertheless, it is a maxim with growers that phal?nopsis should never be transferred from a situation where they are doing well. their hooks are sacred as that on which horace suspended his lyre. nor could a reasonable man think this fancy extravagant, seeing the evidence beyond dispute which warns us that their health is governed by circumstances more delicate than we can analyze at present.

it would be wrong to leave the impression that orchid culture is actually as facile as market gardening, but we may say that the eccentricities of phal?nopsis and the rest have no more practical importance for the class i would persuade than have the terrors of the deep for a thames water-man. how many thousand householders about this city have a "bit of glass" devoted to geraniums and fuchsias and the like! they started with more ambitious views, but successive disappointments have taught modesty, if not despair. the poor man now contents himself with anything that will keep tolerably green and show some spindling flower. the fact is, that hardy plants under glass demand skilful treatment—all their surroundings are unnatural, and with insect pest on one hand, mildew on the other, an amateur stands betwixt the devil and the deep sea. under those circumstances common plants become really capricious—that is, being ruled by no principles easy to grasp and immutable in operation, their discomfort shows itself in perplexing forms. but such species of orchids as a poor man would think of growing are incapable of pranks. for one shilling he can buy a manual which will teach him what these species are, and most of the things necessary for him to understand besides. an expenditure of five pounds will set him up for life and beyond—since orchids are immortal. nothing else is needed save intelligence.

not even heat, since his collection will be "cool" naturally; if frost be excluded, that is enough. i should not have ventured to say this some few years ago—before, in fact, i had visited st. albans. but in the cool house of that palace of enchantment with which mr. sander has adorned the antique borough, before the heating arrangements were quite complete though the shelves were occupied, often the glass would fall very low into the thirties. i could never learn distinctly that mischief followed, though mr. godseff did not like it at all. one who beheld the sight when those fields of odontoglossum burst into bloom might well entertain a doubt whether improvement was possible. there is nothing to approach it in this lower world. i cannot forbear to indicate one picture in the grand gallery. fancy a corridor four hundred feet long, six wide, roofed with square baskets hanging from the glass as close as they will fit. suspend to each of these—how many hundreds or thousands has never been computed—one or more garlands of snowy flowers, a thicket overhead such as one might behold in a tropic forest, with myriads of white butterflies clustering amongst the vines. but imagination cannot bear mortal man thus far. "upon the banks of paradise" those "twa clerks" may have seen the like; yet, had they done so their hats would have been adorned not with "the birk," but with plumes of odontoglossum citrosmum.

i have but another word to say. if any of the class to whom i appeal incline to let "i dare not wait upon i would," hear the experience of a bold enthusiast, as recounted by mr. castle in his small brochure, "orchids." this gentleman had a fern-case outside his sitting-room window, six feet long by three wide. he ran pipes through it, warmed presumably by gas. more ambitious than i venture to recommend, "in this miniature structure," says mr. castle, "with liberal supplies of water, the owner succeeded in growing, in a smoky district of london"—i will not quote the amazing list of fine things, but it numbers twenty-five species, all the most delicate and beautiful of the stove kinds. if so much could be done under such circumstances, what may rightly be called difficult in the cultivation of orchids?