i84 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ments. In some kinds the pitcher ludicrously resembles a hot-water 

 jug of modern British manufacture. The details of the trap vary- 

 somewhat in the different species, but as a whole the modus operandi 

 of the plant is somewhat after this atrocious fashion : The pitcher 

 contains a quantity of liquid, that of the sort appropriately known as 

 the Rajah holding as much as a quart ; and the insect, attracted in 

 most cases by some bright color, crawls down the sticky side, quaffs 

 the unkind Nepenthe, and forgets his troubles forthwith in the vat of 

 oblivion prepared for him beneath by the delusive vases. A slimy 

 Lethe flows over his dissolving corse, and the relentless pitcher-plant 

 sucks his juices to supply his own fibers with the necessary nitrogenous 

 materials. 



The Californian pitcher-plant, or Darlingtonia, is a member of a 

 totally distinct family, which has independently hit upon the same 

 device in the Western world as the Indian Nepenthes in the Eastern 

 hemisphere. The pitcher in this case, though differently produced, is 

 hooded and lidded like its Oriental analogue ; but the inside of the 

 hood is furnished with short hairs, all pointing inward, and legibly 

 inscribed (to the botanical eye) with the appropriate motto, " Vestigia 

 nulla retrorsum.'''* The whole arrangement is colored dingy orange, so 

 as to attract the attention of flies, and it contains a viscid digestive 

 fluid in which the flies are first drowned and then slowly melted 

 and assimilated. The pitchers are often found half full of dead and 

 decaying assorted insects. This circumstance, of course, has not 

 escaped the sharp eyes of the practically minded Californians, who 

 accordingly keep the pitchers growing in their houses, to act as fly- 

 catchers. Such an ingenious utilization of nature, in unconscious com- 

 petition with the papier moule, would surely have occurred only to 

 the two great Pacific civilizations of the Californian and the heathen 

 Chinee. 



There are a great many more of these highly developed insect- 

 eaters, such as the Guiana heliamphora (more classical shapes), the 

 Australian cephalotus, and the American side-saddle flowers, and they 

 all without exception grow in very wet and boggy places, like our own 

 sun-dews, butterworts, and bladderworts. The reason why so many 

 marsh-plants have taken to these strange insect-eating habits is simply 

 that their roots are often very badly supplied with manure or with 

 ammonia in any form ; and, as no plant can get on without these 

 necessaries of life (in the strictest sense), only those marshy weeds 

 have any chance of surviving which can make up in one way or an- 

 other for the native deficiencies of their situation. The sun-dews show 

 us, as it were, the first stage in the acquisition of these murderous hab- 

 its ; the pitcher-plants are the abandoned rufiians which have survived 

 among all their competitors in virtue of their exceptional ruthlessness 

 and deceptive coloration. I ought to add that in all cases the pitchers 

 are not flowers, but highly modified and altered leaves, though in many 



