382 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



fully, that when I find myself defending the Turk against the Russian 

 and all his other enemies, my conscience sometimes inquires whether 

 those lumps of delight prepared for the Sultana hy his Highness the 

 Grand Confectioner, and presented to me by him as a sample of his 

 masterpiece, may, or may not, have ever after influenced my politics. 

 It was gelatine glorified, once tasted never to be forgotten. 



It would seem that gelatine alone, although containing the elements 

 required for nutrition, requires something more to render it digestible. 

 We shall probably be not far from the truth if we picture it to the 

 mind as something too smooth, too neutral, too inert, to set the digest- 

 ive organs at work, and that it therefore requires the addition of a 

 decidedly sapid something that shall make these organs act. I believe 

 that the proper function of the palate is to determine our selection of 

 such materials ; that its activity is in direct sympathy with that of all 

 the digestive organs ; and that, if we carefully avoid the vitiation of 

 our natural appetites, we have in our mouths, and the nervous appara- 

 tus connected therewith, a laboratory that is capable of supplying us 

 with information concerning some of the chemical relations of food 

 which is beyond the grasp of the analytical machinery of the ablest of 

 our scientific chemists. 



There is another element of flesh so intimately connected with 

 gelatine and so much like it, that I must describe its properties before 

 going further into the subject of practical cookery of animal food. I 

 refer to fibrine, which will form the subject of my next paper. Knowl- 

 edge. 







INSECTIVOROUS PLANTS. 



By SALLIE L. ANDREW. 



IT was, I think, during the summer of 1876 that Mr. Darwin's most 

 interesting work on " Insectivorous Plants " fell into my hands, 

 and was read with the delight which the " fairy-tales of science " that 

 came from his hand must ever inspire. As a matter of course, I pro- 

 cured, at once, some plants of the Drosera rotund if oli a, and began a 

 series of amateur experiments, which were to me so interesting that I 

 began to wish all plants might have been created with the same mar- 

 velous properties. 



While my mind was thus employed, I began to notice that the 

 plants of the common garden Petunia (P. grandiflora) were almost 

 always quite freely powdered with the dead or apparently dying 

 bodies of small insects, which seemed to be held fast, either by the 

 hairs with which every part of this plant is covered, or by the gummy, 

 sweetish exudations therefrom. I made pilgrimages to other gardens 

 than our own, invariably finding the petunia-plants covered with the 

 small captives. 



