132 PLANTS WITH TRAPS AND PITFALLS TO ENSNARE ANIMALS. 
glandular cells situated on the lining of the pitcher; and the whole process, wherein 
they are concerned, corresponds to that which obtains in the pitchers of Nepenthes, 
and which will be more thoroughly discussed in the case of these latter plants. 
The species of the genus Nepenthes, of which we know at the present time 
thirty-six, are all confined to the tropics. Their area of distribution extends from 
New Caledonia and New Guinea over tropical Australia to the Seychelles Islands 
and Madagascar, and over the Sunda Islands, the Philippines, Ceylon, Bengal, and 
Cochin-China. They only flourish on marshy ground on the margin of small 
collections of water in damp primeval forests. There the seeds germinate in 
shallow water. The young plants (see fig 23), which spring from the boggy 
ground, have their leaves ar- 
ranged in rosettes just like 
those of Sarracenias (see fig. 
20). They are, too, so nearly 
identical in form with the 
latter that anyone seeing a 
young Nepenthes plant for 
the first time, and not knowing 
the history of its development, 
would take it for a Sarracenia. 
I es vonng Napenthes plante The leaves, succeeding the 
cotyledons and forming a circle 
above them, rest their lower portions upon the mud, but their upper parts are 
curved upwards, and each carries at its extremity a scale resembling a cock’s comb, 
which is, strict speaking, the lamina. This scale roofs over a slit-like aperture, the 
entrance to a cavity within the swollen petiole. In addition a green lobe with a few 
coarse projecting points is to be seen on either side of the orifice. 
Altogether different from the rosettes of young Nepenthes plants are the fohar 
structures clothing the stems which subsequently arise from the rosettes (see fig. 24). 
In these leaves the lower part of the petiole is winged and flat, has a linear or 
lanceolate outline, and resembles the leaf-blade of Dracena; its functions, too, are 
those of a green lamina. This expanded section of the leaf-stalk passes next into 
a part which is terete and coiled like a snake, and acts as a tendril. Every stem or 
branch belonging to a plant, whether living or dead, with which this part of the 
petiole comes into contact, is seized and encircled by it; and the third portion of 
the petiole, i.e. the pitcher, being situated at the extremity of this clasping portion, 
is thus slung upon the branch of some other plant growing at the edge of a pool 
of water. Meanwhile the Nepenthes plant rises higher and higher above the wet 
soil where its seeds germinated and the young rosette rested, becomes entangled 
with the ramifications of the underwood and with prostrate branches of trees of 
the primeval forest; in a word, with everything available as a support, and so not 
infrequently climbs, as a true liane, to the tops of trees of moderate height. 
The pitcher must be looked upon as an excavated portion of the petiole, and 
