Europe, from which all our millions in cultivation have descended.  Where it exists in the native state is unknown, but assuredly this ignorance is nobody’s fault.  For a generation at least skilled explorers have been hunting.  Mr. Sander has had his turn, and has enjoyed the satisfaction of discovering species closely allied, as Eucharis Mastersii and Eucharis Sanderiana; but the old-fashioned bulb is still to seek.

In this third greenhouse is a large importation of Cattleya Trianae, which arrived so late last year that their sheaths have opened contemporaneously with C.  Mossiae.  I should fear to hazard a guess how many thousand flowers of each are blooming now.  As the Odontoglossums cover their stage with snow wreaths, so this is decked with upright plumes of Cattleya Trianae, white and rose and purple in endless variety of tint, with many a streak of other hue between.

Suddenly our guide becomes excited, staring at a basket overhead beyond reach.  It contains a smooth-looking object, very green and fat, which must surely be good to eat—­but this observation is alike irrelevant and disrespectful.  Why, yes!  Beyond all possibility of doubt that is a spike issuing from the axil of its fleshy leaf!  Three inches long it is already, thick as a pencil, with a big knob of bud at the tip.  Such pleasing surprises befall the orchidacean!  This plant came from Borneo so many years ago that the record is lost; but the oldest servant of the farm remembers it, as a poor cripple, hanging between life and death, season after season.  Cheerful as interesting is the discussion that arises.  More like a Vanda than anything else, the authorities resolve, but not a Vanda!  Commending it to the special care of those responsible, we pass on.

Here is the largest mass of Catasetum ever found, or even rumoured, lying in ponderous bulk upon the stage, much as it lay in a Guatemalan forest.  It is engaged in the process of “plumping up.”  Orchids shrivel in their long journey, and it is the importer’s first care to renew that smooth and wholesome rotundity which indicates a conscience untroubled, a good digestion, and an assurance of capacity to fulfil any reasonable demand.  Beneath the staging you may see myriads of withered sticks, clumps of shrunken and furrowed bulbs by the thousand, hung above those leaf-beds mentioned; they are “plumping” in the damp shade.  The larger pile of Catasetum—­there are two—­may be four feet long, three wide, and eighteen inches thick; how many hundreds of flowers it will bear passes computation.  I remarked that when broken up into handsome pots it would fill a greenhouse of respectable dimensions; but it appears that there is not the least intention of dividing it.  The farmer has several clients who will snap at this natural curiosity, when, in due time, it is put on the market.