CHAPTER XXVI 

 PLANTS WHICH PREY ON PLANTS 



The kinds of cannibals — Bacteria — Spring flowers — Pale, ghostly Wood- 

 flowers — Their alliance with fungi — Gooseberries growing on trees — 

 Orchid-hunting — The life of an orchid — The mistletoe — Balder the 

 Beautiful — Druids — Mistletoe as a remedy— Its parasitic roots — The 

 trees it prefers — The Cactus Loranthus — Yellow Rattle and Eyebright, 

 or Milk-thief, and their root-suckers— Broomrape and toothwort — 

 Their colour and tastes — The scales of the toothwort which catch 

 animalcula — Sir Stamford Raffles — A flower a yard across — The 

 Dodder — Its twining stem and sucker-roots — Parasites rare, degenerate 

 and dangerously situated. 



THE word cannibal is often used in a very loose and 

 unscientific way. Amongst some savage tribes it is 

 the custom to eat old people and young children ; but 

 this is only in seasons of famine and scarcity, when there is 

 no other food available, and not because they are specially 

 fond of them. But amongst other tribes wars are made for 

 the special purpose of capturing fat young people to cook. 

 Sometimes they have become so accustomed to such deli- 

 cacies that they are unable to get their food in any other 

 way. Of course, when tribes become "pure cannibals" of 

 this last type they have to be destroyed like wild beasts. 



Among plants we find all sorts of transitions and degrees 

 of cannibalism. There are plants which sometimes, and, as 

 it were, accidentally, attack others. But there are also real 

 cannibal plants which live entirely on the life-juices and 



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