H. BOTANY. 373 



fore the pitcher opens, and is always acid. Its digestive pow- 

 ers were variously tested, and in all cases the action was 

 most evident, in some surprising. Fragments of meat were 

 rapidly reduced ; pieces of fibrine weighing several grains 

 dissolved and totally disappeared in two or three days, and 

 lumps of cartilage of eight to ten grains' weight were half 

 gelatinized in twenty -four hours, and in three days were 

 greatly diminished, and reduced to a clear, transparent jelly. 

 This process, "comparable to digestion," is apparently not 

 wholly due to the fluid first secreted, but it would seem that 

 a substance acting like pepsine is produced, either by the 

 glands or by the cellular tissue in which they are imbedded, 

 after the animal matter is placed in the fluid. 



While acknowledging the difficulty in accounting for the 

 origin of these singular deviations from the otherwise uni- 

 form order of vegetable nutrition, for the rarity of their ap- 

 pearance, and their occurrence in so widely separated re- 

 gions, Dr. Hooker refers to other somewhat like processes, as 

 when in the germinating plant the embryo lives by absorb- 

 ing the nutritive matter stored up in the seed for its use, and 

 as many flowering plants which are destitute of green leaves 

 and unable to elaborate their own proper food grow by ab- 

 sorbing the material of other plants. As respects the origin 

 of the change of habit, the pitcher of Sarracenia may be con- 

 sidered a modified leaf of the water-lily type, which, hollow- 

 ing in the centre, would allow the accumulation oi' debris of 

 various kinds, and some of the saline solutions resulting from 

 the decomposition would become diffused into the substance 

 of the plant-tissues. So in the case of Nepenthes, the whole 

 apparatus and habit may have developed by natural selec- 

 tion from a fluid-secreting gland at the apex of the leaf. In- 

 sects perishing in this secretion would in like manner be to 

 some extent absorbed, and " the subsequent differentiation of 

 the secreting organs of the pitcher into aqueous, saccharine, 

 and acid would follow pari passu with the evolution of the 

 pitcher itself, according to those mysterious laws which re- 

 sult in the correlation of organs and functions throughout the 

 kingdom of Nature, and which transcend in wonder and in- 

 terest those of evolution and the origin of species." 



The phenomena as recorded serve at least as one more link 

 uniting the vegetable and animal kingdoms; showing that 



