Iconographie des Orchidee:A Mysterious Iconography, A Strange Orchid Genus and a Famous Institution

摘要

WHILE RESEARCHING LITERATURE,from time to time one happens upon citations of publications that are completely unknown, almost impossible to locate, and seem to have disappeared. When it was decided that the next planned issue of the journal Renziana(2015), published by the Swiss Orchid Foundation, would be about the actual taxonomic situab'on of the genus Cattleya, I had to look for some articles from old journals for some of the treated critical taxa. During this process the genus name Maelenia and the binomial Maelenia paradoxa showed up; today the binomial is considered to be a synonym of Cattleya forbesii. The genus Maelenia was described (and fortunately) clearly illustrated by Barthelemy Charles Joseph Dumortier in the journal Nouveaux Memoires de I'Academie Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Bruxelles (Dumortier 1834). We do not know who executed the drawing; it was probably Pierre Alexandre Jacquemin, and we will come back to him later on. The same article by Dumortier was published in the same year with a different pagination under the title Notes surle genre Maelenia de la famille des Orchidees. Without doubt, Maelenia paradoxa — shown with a malformed flower without lip — is a synonym of Cattleya forbesii. So far, these arenot new facts, but the history behind Dumortier's publication is leading us to the biographies of two forgotten collectors in Brazil, and in the end, to the widely unknown and overlooked orchid iconography published in 1836.