POLYANDRIA. MONOGYNEA. Vi 
sule 5-celled, 5-valved, many-seeded, valves 
septiferous in the centre. eee 
Herbaceous plants growing in sphagnous’ marshes; 
leaves radical alternate, deformed, hali-way sheathing at 
‘the base, tubular, tube open above, attenuated and imper- 
forate below, the orifice partly covered by an inflected 
lamina or lid, upper part of the tube dorsally alated, 
inner surface of the lower partand operculum, retrorsely 
pilose, so as to entangle and prevent the escape of flies 
and other small insects which attempt to shelter within 
the tubes; scapes 1-flowered, flowers large, red or yellow; 
anthers oblong, adnate to the filaments; seeds rather 
large than minute; somewhat scabrous. 
Species. 1. S. purpurea. Ons. The most northern 
species of the genus, extending to Canada. Leaves ven: 
tricoset. 
-? 
+ The tubes of this species, as well as ofall the following, are 
commonly crowded with dead flies and other insects, perishing 
in imprisonment by one of the wonderful but simple accidents 
of nature;—a lesson for the incantious!—but no proof of in- 
stinct or necessity in the passive Sarracenia which could pro- 
bably well maintain its vegetation without the aid of dead in- 
sects, a remark olen, applicable to many other plants which 
accidentally prove fatal to insects, such as the wonderful Dio- 
nea, which in its native swamps as frequently catches straws 
as flies, and will equally enfold any thing, so subject is it in 
this respect to the blindness of accident. Of what intrinsic 
benefit’are flies to a few of the flowers of Asclepias Syriaca and 
A. incarnata, for the accident here is far from being universal, 
and to the smaller flowered species impossible from the mi- 
nuteness of the organ which proves occasionally an insect trap 
in the larger ones. The same remarks are also applicable 
to the fiowers of the genus Apocynum, and to the ciliated 
glumes of Leersia lenticularis, a property, which if instinctively 
necessary to the support of this species. ought surely to be. 
common to all the others, but their structure, however similar, 
is not such-as to produce the same effect. 
hese extraneous contingencies, like many others, admit no 
‘whore of direct appeals to Nature, than that which permitted 
the leaves of the Aspen, and the flowers of the Briza er to 
tremble in the breeze. Still in oe. men of the Sarracenia 
there appears to exist no ordinary Bree ingenuity to: ac- 
complisb a purpose apparently of such small importance to the 
plant itself. The tube often ventricose in its form, is attenua- 
ted downwards, and (terminated above by a widening aper- 
i oa 
. 
