158 LEAVES FROM MY NOTE-BOOK. 



her silken cocoon with its hundred eggs ; only coming to the 

 surface to secure water-flies and other small insects and to provide 

 herself with fresh bubbles of air, which adhere to the hairs on her 

 body and keep her perfectly dry. This is a sufficiently strange 

 instance of the adaptation of an air-breathing animal to life at the 

 bottom of the water ; but it would be impossible to say for how 

 many thousands of years the Water-Spider has made her diving- 

 bell ; whereas the Paradise Fish must have learned the art of 

 bringing up its young in insufficiently aerated water during that 

 comparatively brief time since human civilisation has begun, and 

 men have had leisure to enjoy the keeping of fish as pets and the 

 art to construct receptacles in which to keep them. 



It would be particularly interesting to know in what manner 

 the fish supplies itself with fresh air on ordinary occasions, since, 

 as it never requires change of water, it must possess some means 

 of oxygenating the water in which it lives. 



Indian Ghost-Flower {Monotropa unifolia. PI. XI).— This 

 poetical name has been given to an aberrant member of the genus 

 EricacecE, which, from its fungus-like manner of obtaining its 

 nourishment, has taken on the superficial appearance of a fungus. 

 Walking in a trail through our woods one afternoon last autumn, 

 I saw, as I imagined, a group of very pretty graceful fungi amidst 

 the bracken. On picking a bunch of these apparent fungi, I 

 found the wax-like, colourless stem supporting an equally w^ax-like, 

 colourless flower, the whole being in shape very like a minute 

 tobacco-pipe. Further examination showed a flower which placed 

 the plant amongst the most highly developed of the dicotyledons. 

 No amount of search showed any trace of a root. The pointed, 

 colourless end of the Ghost-Flower simply penetrated deeply into 

 a deposit of completely decayed wood. A few small, colourless 

 scales represented all it possessed of leaves, the whole plant being 

 absolutely destitute of chlorophyll, and having the appearance of 

 being made of white wax, resembling in this respect a true fungus 

 which grows in the same woods. No mere description, however, 

 can give a correct idea of the peculiar stifl'ness of these groups of 

 little pipes. In decaying, they also resemble fungi in turning of a 

 black colour. I find no mention of this peculiar plant in Balfour's 

 Botany nor the E?icyclopcedia Britannica, but it is known on the 



