Page:Darwin - The various contrivances by which orchids are fertilized by insects (1877).djvu/244

224 this surface becomes at a later period adhesive so as to secure the pollen-masses. The ovules when kept for some time in alcohol were filled with brownish pulpy matter, as is always the case with perfect ovules. Therefore it appears that this Cycnoches must be an hermaphrodite; and Mr. Bateman, in his work on the Orchideæ, says that the present species produces seeds without being, as I understand, artificially fertilised; but how this is possible is unintelligible to me. On the other hand, Beer says that the stigma of Cycnoches is dry, and that the plant never sets seeds. According to Lindley C. ventricosum produces on the same scape flowers with a simple labellum, others with a much segmented and differently coloured labellum (viz., the so-called C. egertonianum), and others in an intermediate condition. From the analogous differences in the flowers of Catasetum, we are tempted to believe that we here have male, female, and hermaphrodite forms of the same species of Cycnoches.

I have now finished my description of the Catasetidæ as well as of many other Vandeæ. The study of these wonderful and often beautiful productions, with all their many adaptations, with parts capable of movement, and other parts endowed with something so like, though no doubt different from, sensibility, has been to me most interesting. The flowers of Orchids, in their strange and endless diversity of shape, may be com-