The Montgomery advertiser., 1904-12-18
ORCHIDS COST LIVES.
Pestilential swamDs and Savages Must Be Faced for Hare Specimens

Pestfleutial Swamps and Savages Must
 Be Faced for Hare Specimens
 Adventures of the collectors who search for orchids through, almost un- known regions would fill many books. They are almost always Germans, for they must have unbounted patience as we'll as courage, power to endure hard ship and combine with these virtues knowledge of professor of science.
 Some years ago a collector for an English firm was sent to New Guinea to look for a new dendrobium. then very rare. He went to the country. dweIt among the natives for six months earing as they fared and living among trying conditions. At last hs collected about 400 of the plants. He loaded Q schooner with them, but when he put | into a port in New Dutch Guinea the ship was burned to the waters edge. | He was ordered to so back for more. and he did. He found a magificient lcollection of the orchids growing in a native burial ground among exposed skulls and bones | After much hesitation the natives allowed him to remove the plants. some of them in the skulls, and sent with l the assignment little idol to watch over them. It is small wonder that these plants sold at prices varying from S5 to $150 apiece.
 A collectors life is in jeopardy from the time he begins his search till it is ended. Oftentimes the danger is not over then, for he may become impregl mated with the germs of an incurable fever or become hopeless invalid Eight naturalists seeking various specimens once dined together in Ta- matave, and one year later there was but a single survivor.
 Even he was terribly afflicted. for af- ter a sojourn ina most malarious swamp he spent twelve months in a hospital. and left without a hope of restored health. Two collectors of a single plant died one after the other. A collector, detained at Panama, went to look for an orchid of which he had heard. The Indians brought him back from the swamps to die.
 An authority on the subject shows that these dangers must be encountered invariably if rare or new orchids are to be found. for he speaks of one which 'clings to the very tip of slender palm in swamps which even the Indians regard with dread as the chosen home of the mosquito and few ers."
 And the dificulties of the work are as great as tho dangers. One collec- tor was known to wade in mud up to his waist for fortnight seeking for specimen of which he had heard; another lived among Indians for eight months looking in untracked forests for A lost variety. To obtain the or- enid which grows on trees the collec- tor must hire the tract of woodland, with the right to fell the trees.
 The natives cannot be trusted to climb to the summits and gather the plants and the collector cannot spare the time. So the wastfu1 plan of fell ing the trees is adopted, and the collsc- tor gathers his specimens from the fallen trunks. This. however, takes place far inland. and the plants must then be brought home. This Is easier said than done. In one case they had to be carried six weeks on mems backs from the mountains to the Essequibo River; then six weeks in canoes with twenty portages to Georgetown, and then over the ocean.
 The same authority before mention ed talks of trip to the Roraima Mountains as quite easy travelling. yet it involved thirty-two loadings and unloadings of the cargo. and in anoth- CT direction lone must go in the bed of a torrent and on the face of a preci- pice, alternately for an uncertain time with a river to cross almost every day" After all this trouble tbe specimens often die on the voyage