i82 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



fruitlet as soon as it is duly impregnated. Afterward, the pollen is 

 shed upon their backs by the bursting of the pollen-bags ; the hairs 

 wither up, and open the previously barricaded exit, and the midges 

 issue forth in search of a new prison and a second drop of honey. This 

 is all strange enough ; but stranger still, I strongly suspect the arum 

 of deliberately hocusing its nectar. I have often seen dozens of these 

 tiny flies rolling together in an advanced stage of apparent intoxica- 

 tion upon the pollen-covered floor of an arum-chamber ; and the evi- 

 dences of drunkenness are so clear and numerous that I incline to 

 believe the plant actually makes them drunk in order to insure their 

 staggering about in the pollen and carrying a good supply of it to the 

 next blossom visited. It is a curious fact that these two totally unre- 

 lated plants (birthwort and arum) should have hit upon the very same 

 device to attract insects of the same class (though not the same spe- 

 cies). The trap must have been independently developed in the two 

 cases, and could only have succeeded with such very stupid, unintelli- 

 gent creatures as the flies and midges. 



From plants that imprison insects to plants that devour insects aliv® 

 is a natural transition. The giant who keeps a dungeon is first-cousin 

 to the ogre who swallows down his captives entire. And yet the sub- 

 ject is really too serious a one for jesting ; there is something too aw- 

 ful and appalling in this contest of the unconscious and insentient with 

 the living and feeling, of a lower vegetative form of life with a higher 

 animated form, that it always make me shudder slightly to think of it. 

 Do you remember Victor Hugo's terrible description (I think it is in 

 " Quatre-Vingt-Treize ") of the duel between the great gun that has 

 got loose from its chains on a ship in a storm, and the men who try to 

 recapture it ? Do you remember how the gun lunges, and tilts, and 

 evades, and charges, exactly as if it were a living, sentient creature ; and 

 yet all the while the full horror of the thing depends upon the very fact 

 that it is nothing more than a piece of lifeless, senseless metal, driven 

 about on its wheels irresponsibly by the fury of the storm ? Well, 

 that description is awful and horrible enough ; but it yet lacks one 

 element of awesomeness which is present in the insect-eating plants, 

 and that is the clear evidence of deliberate design and adaptation. 

 When a crumbling cliff falls and crushes to death the creatures on the 

 beach beneath it, we see in their fate only the accidental working of 

 the fixed and unintentional laws of nature ; but when a plant is so 

 constructed, with minute cunning and deceptive imitativeness, that it 

 continually and of malice prepense lures on the living insect, genera- 

 tion after generation, to a lingering death in its unconscious arms, 

 there seems to be a sort of fiendish impersonal cruelty about its action 

 which sadly militates against all our pretty platitudes about the beauty 

 and perfection of living beings. It is quite a relief that we are able 

 nowadays to shelve off the responsibility upon a dead materialistic law 

 like natural selection or survival of the fittest. Hartmann's " Uncon- 



