QUEER FLOWERS. 183 



scious " stands modern naturalists in good stead vice the personal inter- 

 ference of the mediaeval or Miltonic devil, absent on leave. 



On most English peaty patches there grows a little reddish-leaved, 

 odd-looking plant, known as sun-dew. It is but an inconspicuous, small 

 weed, and yet literary and scientific honors have been heaped upon its 

 head to an extent almost unknown in the case of any other member of 

 the British floral commonwealth. Mr. Swinburne has addressed an 

 ode to it, and Mr. Darwin has written a learned book about it. Its 

 portrait has been sketched by innumerable artists, and its biography 

 narrated by innumerable authors. And all this attention has been 

 showered upon it, not because it is beautiful, or good, or modest, or 

 retiring, but simply and solely because it is atrociously and deliberately 

 wicked. Like the late Mr. Peace and the heroes of the Newgate Cal- 

 endar, it owes its vogue entirely to its murderous propensities. Sun- 

 dew, in fact, is the best known and most easily accessible of the car- 

 nivorous and insectivorous plants. 



The leaf of the sun-dew is round and flat, and is covered by a num- 

 ber of small red glands, which act as the attractive advertisement to 

 the misguided midges. Their knobby ends are covered with a gluti- 

 nous secretion, which glistens like honey in the sunlight, and so gains 

 for the plant its common English name. But the moment a hapless 

 fly, attracted by hopes of meat or nectar, settles quietly in its midst, 

 on hospitable thoughts intent, the viscid liquid holds him tight imme- 

 diately, and clogs his legs and wings, so that he is snared exactly as a 

 peregrine is snared with bird-lime. Then the leaf with all its " red- 

 lipped mouths " (I will own up that the expression is Mr. Swinburne's, 

 uhi supra) closes over him slowly but surely, and crushes him by fold- 

 ing its edges inward gradually toward the center. The fly often lin- 

 gers long with ineffectual struggles, while the cruel crawling leaf pours 

 forth a digestive fluid — a vegetable gastric juice, as it were — and dis- 

 solves him alive piecemeal in its hundred clutching suckers. I have 

 seen this mute tragedy enacted a thousand times over on the bogs and 

 moorlands ; and, though I often try to release the fresh flies from their 

 ghastly living but inanimate prison, it is impossible to go round all the 

 plants on a whole common, like a philodipterous Howard, ameliorating 

 the condition of all the victims of misplaced confidence in the good 

 intentions of the treacherous sun-dew. 



Our little English insectivorous plants, however (we have at least 

 five or six such species in our own islands), are mere clumsy bunglers 

 compared to the great and highly developed insect-eaters of the trop- 

 ics, which stand to them in somewhat the same relation as the Bengal 

 tiger stands to the British wildcat or the skulking weasel. The In- 

 dian pitcher-plants or Nepenthes bear big pitchers of very classical 

 shapes (it is well known that Greek art has largely affected India), 

 closed in the early state with a lid, which lifts itself and opens the 

 pitcher as soon as the plant has fully completed its insecticidal arrange- 



