Of all orchids no genus we can just now call to mind is more distinct or is composed of species more widely divergent in size, form, structure, and color than is this one of Masdevallia. It was founded well nigh a century ago by Ruiz and Pavon on a species from Mexico, M. uniflora. which, so far as I know, is nearly if not quite unknown to present day cultivators. When Lindley wrote his "Genera and Species" in 1836, three species of Masdevallias only were known to botanists but twenty-five years later, when he prepared his "Folio Orchidaceæ," nearly forty species were; known in herbaria, and today perhaps fully a hundred kinds are grown in our gardens, while travelers tell us of all the gorgeous beauties which are known to exist high up on the cloud-swept sides of the Andes and Cordilleras of the New World. The Masdevallia is confined to the Western hemisphere alone, and as in bird and animal distribution, so in the case of many orchids we find that when any genus is confined to one hemisphere, those who look for another representative genus in the other are rarely disappointed.

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