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Abstract
Not only is the Orchidaceae one of the largest families of Angiosperms, but it also has the least elucidated taxonomy of families of flowering plants of comparable size. This is in part due to the paucity of workers in this family. However, the Orchids have long been a problematic group in which relationships between taxa are extremely complex and often obscured by parallelism and rapid evolution of floral morphology. The family has a subcosmopolitan distribution, being equally characteristic of both tropical and temperate regions (Good, 1964) but the actual number of species is immensely greater in the tropics. It is with these tropical species that the taxonomical problems are compounded. Confusion arises particularly at the generic level. Many genera were described from collections made by the early botanical expeditions in the tropics. Numbers of these preserved specimens were scanty, and they often lacked important diagnostic features. Subsequent collections included species that bridged many of these early generic concepts. Later workers, attempting to clarify the delimitations of these genera, grouped species which shared some "key" character. Even the more painstaking workers followed this tendency. In the writing of keys for groups of species, many characters or features are considered, sifted and sorted. When one particular feature emerges from the numerous other characters in what the author considers is a natural grouping, then he tends to over-emphasize the importance of that one feature. Thereafter, any species displaying that feature is included in that particular group. Very often, however, these characters are found to intergrade or are of little significance in indicating true relationships, being the outcome of parallel evolution or convergence. Instead of re-evaluating the original defining character, the tendency has been either to shuffle these problem groups back and forth between taxa or to set up new categories. A case in point is the genus Arachnis in the subtribe Sarcanthinae.
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