peloric
\Pe*lo"ric\, a. (Bot.) Abnormally regular or symmetrical. --Darwin.

I do not really know what Darwin means here. I think he coined the term.
He used it 3 or 4 times in "The Origin of Species." (peloric, peloria) I
was able to locate 1 instance from online publications of this book. It
refers only to color or marking variation on petals. My golly, the sentence
structure in this book is Victorian at it's most difficult.

I can not say if Darwin would agree with you or not about the flower in the
epicure but I have been unable to get in touch with him to ask. As devil's
advocate, he and I are housed on a different levels of hell and
communication between levels is notoriously spotty even in this age of
wireless communication and as you might guess, this being hell, most cases
where the technology works are somewhat nefarious.

I do believe the word peloric is alive and well and in no way fixed in
meaning by it's botanical definition. Use it anyway you want. If you say
it is peloric I will know what you mean. :-)

Al
The sign on my little red tag says: Caution: when cornered may dissemble
without warning.

"Susan Erickson" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 24 May 2004 14:40:50 -0400, "Al"
wrote:

I expected as much when I posted. But Even thou a standard
definition of peloric would require a third lip or 3 petals - I
think this is equally symmetric and abnormal in its irregularity.
It has both the petals and the sepals abnormally truncated from 3
to 2 and they display opposite one another. Thus the display is
symmetric and the flower is symmetrically balanced in appearance.

So devil's advocate -- how is that not peloric? Where did it say
that it had to maintain 3 "petal/lip" parts? Or 3 sepal parts? I
heard only the symmetrical in its irregularity of the flower
parts.

SuE
http://orchids.legolas.org/gallery/albums.php