Ill Other Insectivorous Plants 59 



for the movements, the increased and changed secretion of 

 Drosera, still more of Dionsea, are obviously not by mere 

 transpiration to be explained away. And even if the stress 

 hitherto laid upon digestion be more or less given up, and 

 bacteria be admitted as essential factors in the process, 

 must not, even on the new hypothesis, that of regulation of 

 transpiration, the absorption of the soluble products of decay, 

 be all the greater and the more regular, and the importance 

 of insect-catching as a source of nitrogen to the plant be 

 reaffirmed in an altered but even developed form ? 



Here, indeed, to the writer's mind, we are nearing the 

 probable solution of the case in a compromise, which may 

 indeed give up insectivorism as the main function, yet re- 

 instate it as a secondary one. In all the preceding descrip- 

 tions of different scenes of the organic drama we have been 

 noting, around what was at first described as the main action, 

 more or less of secondary incident. And now if this ap- 

 parently main action turn out to be itself but secondary and 

 incidental to a deeper lying and more general action, we 

 may be indeed for a moment confused and perplexed, but 

 our whole interpretation settles itself anew into a richer and 

 more complex form, to which all the preceding interpreta- 

 tions have contributed. Nor is even this new view in turn 

 necessarily final, yet the student-spectator has not lost his 

 pains who can feel and say that while nature's art is long, 

 his time short, experiment fleeting, judgment difficult, yet 



In Nature's infinite book of secrecy 

 I can a little read. 



