White and Greenish 



thus appearing to be twice as many. Scape: 4 to 10 in. 

 high. Leaves : Growing in an open rosette on the ground ; 

 round or broader, clothed with reddish bristly hairs tipped 

 with purple glands, and narrowed into long, flat, hairy peti- 

 oles ; young leaves curled like fern fronds. 



Preferred Habitat— ^ogs, sandy and sunny marshes. 



Ftowerifig Season — ^july — August. 



X>/j/;77;////^«— Labrador to the Gulf of Mexico and westward. 

 From Alaska to California. Europe and Asia. 



Here is a bloodthirsty little miscreant that lives by reversing 

 the natural order of higher forms of life preying upon lower ones, 

 an anomaly in that the vegetable actually eats the animal ! The 

 dogbane, as we have seen (p. 1 34), simply catches the flies that 

 dare trespass upon the butterflies' preserves, for excellent reasons 

 of its own ; the Silenes and phloxes, among others, spread their 

 calices with a sticky gum that acts as limed twigs do to birds, in 

 order to guard the nectar secreted for flying benefactors from pil- 

 fering ants ; the honey bee being an imported, not a native, in- 

 sect, and therefore not perfectly adapted to the milkweed, occa- 

 sionally gets entrapped by it ; the big bumblebee is sometimes 

 fatally imprisoned in the moccasin flower's gorgeous tomb— the 

 punishment of insects that do not benefit the flowers is infinite in 

 its variety. But the local Venus's flytrap {Dionaea muscipula), 

 gathered only from the low savannas in North Carolina to entertain 

 the owners of hothouses as it promptly closes the crushing trap 

 at the end of its sensitive leaves over a hapless fly, and the com- 

 mon sundew that tinges the peat-bogs of three continents with 

 its little reddish leaves, belong to a distinct class of carnivorous 

 plants which actually masticate their animal food, depending upon 

 it for nourishment as men do upon cattle slaughtered in an abat- 

 toir. Darwin's luminous account of these two species alone, 

 which occupies over three hundred absorbingly interesting pages 

 of his " Insectivorous Plants," should be read by everyone inter- 

 ested in these freaks of nature. 



When we go to some sunny cranberry bog to look for these 

 sundews, nothing could be more innocent looking than the tiny 

 plant, its nodding raceme of buds, usually with only a solitary 

 little blossom (that opens only in the sunshine) at the top of the 

 curve, its leaves glistening with what looks like dew, though the 

 midsummer sun may be high in the heavens. A little fly or gnat, 

 attracted by the bright jewels, alights on a leaf only to find that 

 the clear drops, more sticky than honey, instantly glue his feet, 

 that the pretty reddish hairs about him act like tentacles, reaching 

 inward, to imprison him within their slowly closing embrace. 

 Here is one of the horrors of the Inquisition operating in this land 

 of liberty before our very eyes ! Excited by the struggles of the 

 victim, the sensitive hairs close only the faster, working on the 



13 ^93 



