92 DROSEEACEtE 



plant and an animal should pour forth the same, or nearly the same, complex 

 secretion, adapted for the same purposes of digestion," is, as Mr. Darwin 

 remarks, " a wonderful fact in physiology." 



The tentacles of these plants are most beautiful objects when seen under 

 a microscope of high power. If one of these is cut off and soaked for about 

 two days in glycerine, by which means the vegetable tissue is macerated, the 

 spiral vessels which run up from the blade to the gland look like little coils 

 of wire, so delicate and slender that no human hand could make such. 



Some accounts of those vegetable traps, the butterworts and bladderworts, 

 occur on later pages of this work, but no movements similar to these and the 

 Sundews seem to belong to any other of our wild flowers, though some show 

 considerable sensitiveness to the touch. The movements of the stamens of 

 some, when touched by the feet of an insect or the point of a needle, are due 

 to vegetable irritability. The flower of the barberry is so affected by the 

 slightest touch that the anthers quickly turn inwards. Those of the rock 

 rose are equally sensitive, and the stamens of the pellitory of the wall will 

 Avhen ripe discharge their pollen, if but a foot of an emmet touches them. 

 Some other wild flowers, and garden flowers too, catch insects by holding 

 fast those which come to taste their sweets. Our red German catchfly 

 {Lychnis viscaria) and some species of silene are in summer months often 

 darkened by little crowds thus entrapped. The tall purple loosesti'ife 

 (Lyfhntm salicaria), which makes our river-sides so gay with its pyramids of 

 purplish crimson flowers, is another temptation to insects, and detains them 

 by hundreds. That well-known tree, the Tacmahac poplar (Popuhis halsamifera), 

 has its buds from autumn till the leafing season so covered with a glutinous 

 yellow resin that mviltitudes of the latest and earliest insects of the year are 

 ensnared by it. Even the large leaf of the teasel of our hedges (JJipsacv.'^ 

 sylvestris) forms a hollow basin in which the dew and the rain from heaven form 

 a little crystal pool, and into this ::iany a thirsty insect plunges, onl}^ to be 

 drowned. 



But though our Sundews have no congeners on our native soil, yet the 

 well-known plant of our hot-houses, the Venus' fly-trap (Dioncea muscipula), 

 presents a still larger and firmer trap in its leaves, which are surrounded by 

 bristles, and which close tightly over large butterflies, honey bees, and even 

 beetles, whose decomposed remains emit a most intolerable odour. Three 

 stiff hairs in the centre of each lobe of the leaf hold fast these creatures, 

 which might otherwise be large enough to escape. These steel-like traps 

 have also a secretion which completely absorbs and digests insects, and 

 pieces of meat also form a welcome meal to them. This plant excited the 

 interest and wonder of Linnseus, when a drawing and description of Dionsea 

 were first sent him by our great naturalist Ellis, about the year 1768. 

 Linnseus was greatly astonished at a mechanism so evidently intended for 

 entrapping and destroying insects, and said that, though he had seen and 

 examined no small number of plants, he had never met with so wonderful a 

 phenomenon. It does not, however, appear that he took quite the same view 

 as did Ellis of the use, for the latter remarks of the contiivancos of the plant, 

 that they show that "Nature may have some views towards its nourishment in 

 forming the upper joint of its leaf like a machine to catch food ; for upon the 



