86 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 



a mere form and quite calculated to make the adherents 

 of the "American code" turn green with envy. In the 

 early days of botany, every plant was designated by 

 a string of latin words something like this, but Lin- 

 neaus and his contemporaries brought order out of chaos 

 by perfecting the binomial system by means of which each 

 plant was designated by two words and no more. It has re- 

 mained for the moderns to turn this back in to a semblance of 

 the nomenclature of the middle ages. It is not quite fair, 

 however, to class this example with those of pre-Linnaeau 

 days for in the new scheme, the position of each word stands 

 for a certan degree of distinctness, and may be roughly likened 

 in this respect to the figures in the decimal system. 



The Pitcher-plant's Pitchers. — It has usually been 

 taken for granted that the pitcher plant {Sarracenia purpurea) 

 catches and digests insects for the nitrogen they contain, just 

 as the sundew, butter-wort and others are known to do. 

 Some experiments which have recently been carried on by Miss 

 Winifred J. Robinson seem to indicate that the chief function 

 of the pitchers is not that of catching insects, but of storing 

 water for the use of the plant. While the experiments ap- 

 parently prove that the pitchers have no fat-digesting or pro- 

 tein-dissolving powers, it has been shown that they are able 

 to reduce sucrose and starch to simple sugars. The author 

 says: "Sarracenia purpurea belongs to the class of plants, 

 which like the bromeliads of the tropics or our Northern catch- 

 fly, illustrates a mal-adaption between plant and animals, for 

 while they serve as traps for insects they are neither harmed 

 nor benefitted by them, unless the number be very great. In 

 the sphagnum bogs where Sarracenia grows, the concentration 

 of salts and nitrogenous matter about its roots is so great as to 

 place them practically under xerophytic conditions. This 

 would tend to render the root system inefficient as a means of 

 water absorption and make the possession of a water-storing 



