Beyond the screen at
present lies an area of mud and ruin, traversed by broken walls and rows
of hot-water piping swathed in felt to exclude the chill air. A few
weeks since, this little wilderness was covered with glass, but the ends
of the long "houses" have been cut off to make room for a structure into
which visitors will step direct from the train. The platform is already
finished, neat and trim; so are the vast boilers and furnaces, newly
rebuilt, which would drive a cotton factory.
A busy scene that is which we survey, looking down through openings in
the wall of the corridor. Here is the composing-room, where that
magnificent record of orchidology in three languages, the
"Reichenbachia," slowly advances from year to year. There is the
printing-room, with no steam presses or labour-saving machinery, but the
most skilful craftsmen to be found, the finest paper, the most
deliberate and costly processes, to rival the great works of the past in
illustrating modern science. These departments, however, we need not
visit, nor the chambers, lower still, where mechanical offices are
performed.
The "Importing Room" first demands notice. Here cases are received by
fifties and hundreds, week by week, from every quarter of the orchid
world, unpacked, and their contents stored until space is made for them
up above. It is a long apartment, broad and low, with tables against the
wall and down the middle, heaped with things which to the uninitiated
seem, for the most part, dry sticks and dead bulbs.
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