10 TRANSACTIONS OF THE [oer. 17, 
the studies of Darwin and were naturally directed in an exper- 
imental way towards the plant’s digestive powers, and furnished 
little more than an outline of its actual predatory habits. Other 
local accounts appear to have been of a somewhat exaggerated 
charactor in regard to both the size and the quantity of prey 
that has been taken. On the other hand ideas of the life habits 
of the plant can hardly be regarded as accurate based upon 
hot-house specimens that have become more or less artificialized, 
and have lacked the kind and quantity of usual food elements. 
It has seemed accordingly in the case of a plant as local as 
Dionaea, especially desirable to determine more accurately the 
degree to which the specialized traps are active in providing 
food, (2), the kind of material collected, and (8), the 
ways and means followed in the collecting process. Results 
thus obtained might, if noteworthy, prove of value in directing 
lines of study in this peculiar branch of plant physiology. 
Dionaea is almost exclusively confined to the Savannahs 
directly eastward of Wilmington, a tract of perhaps a dozen 
miles inlength. In this tract the plant is plentiful only at 
special points, as a mile east of Wrightville, a few rods south of 
the shell road. Here, as an instance, have been counted as 
many as fifty plants to a square yard. The supply, however, is 
in general a limited one, and is decreasing year by year, mainly, 
it is said, on account of the great increase of forest fires and the 
subsequent clearing up of the land. The plant’s northern range 
appears to be sharply drawn at the Cape Fear river.* West of 
Wilmington the plant occurs but is said to be rare. Southward 
it is still more uncommon; it has been taken by Mr. Walter 
Hoxie, of Beaufort, S. C., on Fripp’s Island, on Coxspur Island 
off the Georgia coast, and once at the head of Mosquito Lagoon 
below St. Augustine. 
The home of the plant is in the typical Savannah, rough sedgy 
meadow land sprinkled with scanty yellow pines, clumps of 
stunted beeches broken here and there by shallow sphagnum 
pools. The pools are quite characteristic of the region, occupy- 
ing depressions often not more than a yard across and usually 
but a few inches in depth. ‘The edges are shelving, denuded, 
often abrupt, showing in section a layer of surface black mould 
above yellow-white sand. Grasses and sedges grow down to 
the brink and bend over, often drooping their blades into the 
shelving basin below. It is at the edges of the grass clumps 
that Dionaea frequently occurs, often displaying its trap leaves 
on the bare margin of the basin. This position, though appar- 
* Wood and McCarthy, Wilmington Flora, Raleigh, 1887, 
