140 :JSotani^ 



often caught, but bees very seldom. Bees have their 

 affairs to attend to, and cannot go j^icnicking into 

 pitcher-plants. 



There is a little water-weed, furnished with 

 numerous bladders, which were once supposed to 

 act as floats for it, but are really traps for tiny in- 

 sects — " eel traps," Sir John Lubbock calls them. 

 The insects crawl in, but a ring of hairs that will 

 not bend outward hinders their escape, and the 

 plant very soon has sucked their bodies dry. 



The Venus fly-trap, or dionea, has an ingenious 

 arrangement for catching insect food. A part of the 

 leaf is furnished with a strong hinge, some honey 

 dew and a fringe of prickles. When an insect alights 

 on this pretty device the hinge snaps the sides of the 

 leaf together, the i3rickles pierce the body of the 

 captive, and drink it dry. Such are some of the 

 varieties of plant-food. 



The consideration of what plants eat suggest to us 

 what peculiar products they furnish to us. Of these 

 we will but briefly enumerate starch, albumen, flour ; 

 sugar, which is very abundant in some maples, in 

 sorghum, and sugar canes, in beets, carrots, and 

 other plants ; gum-arabic, gutta-percha, resin, tur- 

 pentine, sweet or olive oil, other oils, balsams, gums, 

 camphor, many dyes, many useful acids, and many 

 very strong poisons. The ingenuity of man has 



