Daisies and Thistles 201 
bracts are rigid, ending in long bristles which prevent 
insects touching anthers or stigmas with their bodies. 
The stamens shed their pollen before the stigmas are 
mature. Humble-bees are the pollen-carriers. The 
whole plant is interesting on account of its offensive 
and defensive qualities. Its ancestors have evidently 
suffered much from browsing animals and from honey- 
stealers; but at the present time the plant has 
succeeded in checkmating both. For the herbivorous 
mammals it has developed a vast number of 
sharp spines upon its leaves, its many-ridged 
stems, and the very long involucral bracts. 
The creeping honey-thieves it not merely 
keeps away from the flowers on its four- 
to-eight-feet stems, but it turns the tables 
upon them so completely as to drown them 
and then convert them into food. The leaves 
are in pairs, united by their bases so that ) 
each pair forms a capacious basin, with the Tease! Flower 
stem coming through itscentre. These basins 
fill with rain and dew, and crawling insects such 
as ants, earwigs, caterpillars, and many beetles, in 
their efforts to reach the flowers, fall into the water 
and are drowned. You may often find dozens of 
such victims in a more or less advanced stage of 
disintegration; and the sensitive cells of the plant 
have discovered that the water in the basin has 
become nitrogenous—a kind of Bovril for plants— 
and have sent out wisps of protoplasm into it, so that 
its goodness may be absorbed for the general benefit 
of the entire organism. 
