CHAP. Ill Other Insectivorous Plants 37 



leaves surrounds the base of a flower-stalk which bears 

 numerous flowers at a height of four to six inches from the 

 ground. Each leaf is a fly-trap. The broadly flattened or 

 winged {spathulate) stalk is constricted to the midrib at 

 its junction with the bilobed blade, the halves of which are 

 movable on one another along the middle, closing together 

 with a snap, as a very tightly-bound book will sometimes 

 do. Around each margin are twelve to twenty long teeth, 

 and, when the leaf closes, those of one side interlock with 

 those of the other, thus forming a very perfect miniature rat- 

 trap. The centre of each half-leaf bears numerous rosy 

 glands, and on each side there are three hairs, which an old 

 naturahst described as spikes to impale the captured insect, 

 but which are really quite weak, and bend flat on a basal 

 joint when the leaf closes. 



The student will find it easy and useful to make 

 a paper model, cutting it out the proper shape, folding 

 it along the middle line, carefully fashioning the teeth 

 at each margin, so as to interlock neatly, and gumming 

 on the three hairs on each half- blade, or more simply 

 snipping them from the texture of the paper. The glands 

 may easily be supplied with a red pencil, and a toy, not 

 to be despised by young or old, is the result. Let us see 

 how the trap works. If we go — preferably on a warm 

 and bright day — to our plant, which is common in green- 

 houses in this country, and with a finger touch the leaf the 

 closure follows. More careful experiment with anything 

 nearer the size of the insect's leg, say a pencil-point, shows 

 that we may wander all over both surfaces of the leaf or the 

 marginal tentacles with safety until we touch one or more of 

 the projecting hairs ; and repeated experiment shows them 

 to be alone sensitive — the two halves of the blade close. 

 In the plant's native haunts some insect does what our 

 finger did, and if in the rapid closure of the leaf the prey be 



