The Dupuyer acantha. [volume] (Dupuyer, Mont.) 1894-1904, 1900-10-25
Comforts That Cost
MANY LIVES
To Secure Them.

There was a discussion the other day
In a well known florists place as to how
many lives orchids had cost. One par
ticularly dainty specimen was pointed
out as having probably the bloodiest rec
ord, for five lives were lost in the effort
to carry the first lot that ever had been
seen to the coast. This was in Batavia.
and out of a party of six orchid hunters
only one reached home with the flow
ers. One of the others had died from
snakebite, two from fever and one had
been lost in the swamps in the interior
and had no doubt persisted there. 1t is a
strange thing that Of all exotic things
these, the most dainty and fragile and
tenderly beautiful, should nave SO red a
history. Yet, if one could know all the
n~liseries and pains and frightful lonely
deaths that have been endured by the
orchid hunters, every bloom in the coun,
try would seem to be dripping with blood.
Many things contribute to this. In the
first place, orchids usually are in wilder
nesses that, besides being almost or en-.
tirely primeval, are infested with deadly
levers and equally deadly serpents and
insects. Again, SO fierce is the rivalry
between the hunters for the honor and
financial profit of obtaining new or rare
specimens that the men usually go alone,
and thus have no one on whom to call
When they get into trouble or fall ill.
Perhaps 1t is merciful that dead men
can tell no tales. Else terrible narra-
tves might come from the h
sol1tudes where men have lain for lays
and sometimes weeks dying from fever,
with no living being within hundreds Of
miles.
There Is the story of that hunter whg
had searched for many months for a par
ticular specimen that he knew was in ex-
lstence, but which seemed as evastve as
It 1t had the gift of motion. He had trav-
ersed mile after mile of morass and thick
ct and jungle day after day, untiI he Wa.
worn out body and soul, and he was
about to give up the search when sud-
denly, through an open glade, he spied the
object of his long search. The sight gave
him new life. Quickly he rushed to the
tree where the glorious flower hung and
seized the stem which he saw twined
around the trunk. But the stem Writhed
and struck at him. A brown kerait, the
deadliest snake of the tropics, had been
hanging among the Turing flowers, and
the hunter died within a few hours. Ac-
cidentally a party of s~portsmen, searching
the thicket for big game, came upon the
body. The man had killed the snake.
1t lay near him, and so the whole story
was plain as if it had been told in words,
News came some years ago that a new
kind Of tree cat was to be found in East
Africa. Two scientists set out indepen-
IDENTIFY, each resolved to get a specimen
a beautiful brown animal with fluffy ears
-or die. One of them did die before his
expedition had gone two days march into
%Lo hall ao,,-A,,, 100 49, 49,. u--z-
Meyrick by name-a very seasoned collec-
tor-went into the heart of East Africa
with an escort of twenty native guides
and carriers. Though passing through
the finest big game country in the world,
he shot nothing except for food; and af-
ter two severe attacks of fever, a narrow
escape from death by a snake bite, and
the desertion of his native followers, it is
related by the New York Press, he OBJ
tanned a specimen of the brown tree cat
alive and another dead. He spent two
years in the wilds before this success
came to him, but he came back to Eng
land triumphant.
Edelweiss-'noble white in English
that beautiful, aptly named silver white
plant which grows nowhere except in the
Alps. and there only on the edges of the
tAClAISIIAO0S III (hiP1NCS, COSl HUH
dreds of lives. Most of those who sacri-
feed themselves in the search for it were
mountaineers, who gathered it to sell.
But scores of visitors to the Alps have
climbed to dangerous points and swung
themselves over abysses to reach "A sin
gle tiny sprig of it, and. losing their foot
hold, have crashed thousands of feet to
death. Last year two women thus
dragged each other over the edge of one
of the high peaks, and when the bodies
were found one had in her hand the little
growth which had cost two lives.
The magnificent b~lue-and-white Papuar
harp butterfly of New Guinea was the
despair of scientists for years. There was
one ragged specimen in the Berlin mu
seum-the only one known. A score OF
travellers tried to get one, but in vain, fol
this butterfly, which is very rare, haunts
the tops of the highest trees in the wild.
est parts of New Guinea. The Papuani
are hostile and treacherous. The frs
two collectors nearly were massacred by
them. They escaped, but after sis
months search and great hardships hat
to abandon the quest
They reported hat it was impossible tc
get an example of the Paupan harp, be-
cause the natives would never allow any
stranger in the inner forests. Even wher
there, one might spend a year without
seeing the harp. This did not deter How
ard Whitby, the famous zoologist, and
his Australian, attendant from trying
Whitby was caught and tortured to deatf
by the Papuans, the Australian, however
escaping. Several more failures occurred
and two n-o Dutch, and the thel
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