334 



STUDIES IN LIFE AND SENSE. 



the prey has been captured, the leaf-glands perform their digestive and 

 absorptive function ; its body is disintegrated, and its nutritive parts 

 absorbed ; such an operation requiring varying periods of time, ex- 

 tending from fifteen days to thirty-five days or more. 



It remains now to show that the habits of these plants include 

 certain remarkable features which certainly resemble those phases ot 



FIG. 36. VENUS' FLY-TRAP. 

 (Leaf open at a ; partially closed at b ; and almost closed at c.) 



the animal character that are commonly included under the term 

 intelligent choice and selection. The observation of the sundew's 

 life demonstrates that its tentacles will move and contract much 

 more quickly when a piece of animal-matter is placed on the leaf 

 than when any inorganic or mineral substance is offered to the plant. 

 Nor is this all, for, as Mr. Darwin has shown, the tentacles of this plant 

 will remain bent for an infinitely longer period over matters from 

 which nutriment of any kind is to be extracted, than over particles 

 which can afford no nourishment. So also the return of the ten- 

 tacles to what may be named their state of rest is quicker when an 

 inorganic particle has been the exciting cause, than when they have 

 been stimulated by the presence of something eatable. This observa- 

 tion seems strikingly analogous to that whereby the animal form, 

 after disappointment in the capture of prey, returns quickly to 

 its lair. Such results, verified repeatedly, appear to suggest that in 

 these plants there exists a discriminative power of by no means a 

 lowly type, and which loses none of its curious nature by the reflec- 

 tion that it is exercised through the living protoplasm of the plant. 



