A Guide to the Orchids of Sikkim

The present guide is written for use in field and forest, in green-house and the verandah, where whole living plants are available for examination; people who are under the impression that satisfactory and expeditious identifications can be effected by means of little bits off the top or by fragments of leaves are greatly mistaken.  Dried herbarium specimens – mere corpses – are ugly and difficult to analyse, and there is much to be learnt about plant life by its study in field and forest.  The guide is chiefly written for non-botanists, although it may not be without use even to the professed student of botany.  Like its more comprehensive forerunner, it has been tested over and over again, and that much to its own advantage, by friends who are interested in plants without pretending to be expert botanists.  The terms used are mostly ordinary English terms, and such terms as rhizome, pseudobulb, scape, calyx, corolla, stamens, anthers, pollen, ovary, inflorescence, petiole, peduncle, pedicel, are probably sufficiently well known not to be in need of elaborate explanations.  There is nothing particularly "scientific" about Anglo-Latin and Anglo-Greek terms; botanical books written in Germanic and Slavonic languages manage to get along quite well without them.  A few terms are explained further on and the accompanying plate will be helpful.