BLADDER- WORTS. 1 77 



and often impassable for horses, being half dried above and 

 wet beneath. The vegetation grew, not over the whole, but 

 in innumerable tussocks, which made walking very difticnlt. 

 The type of the rushes and grasses was very English : but 

 among them grew, here and there, plants which excited my 

 astonishment; above all, certain Bladder- worts,i which I 

 had expected to find, but which, when found, were so utterly 

 unlike any English ones, that I did not recognize at first 

 what they were. Our English Bladder-w^orts, as every- 

 body knows, float in stagnant water on tangles of hair-like 

 leaves, something like those of the "\Yater-Eanunculus, but 

 furnished with innumerable tiny bladders ; and this raft 

 supports the little scape of yellov/ snapdragon-like flowers. 

 There are in Trinidad and other parts of South America 

 Bladder-worts of this type. But those which we found to- 

 day, growing out of the damp clay, were more like in habit 

 to a delicate stalk of flax, or even a bent of grass, upright, 

 leafless or all but leafless, with heads of small blue or yellow 

 flowers, and carrying, in one species, a few very minute 

 bladders about the roots, in another none at all. A strange 

 variation from the normal type of the family ; yet not so 

 strange, after all, as that of another variety in the high 

 mountain woods, which, finding neither ponds to float in or 

 swamp to root in, has taken to lodging as a parasite anion 



1 Utriciilaria. 

 VOL. II. N 



O 



