THE PITCHER-PLANT. 59 



to escape only serve therefore to push him further and further 

 toward the bottom. But before he reaches that he will find himself 

 plunged into a watery liquid which the leaf secretes, and which 

 acts upon him first as a powerful narcotic or anaesthetic, and when 

 he is once dead, as a dissolvent which will quickly change his 

 tissue into a "liquid fertilizer " wherewith to nourish the hungry 

 plant. 



Winged insects in most cases fare but little better, for if 

 they fly directly upward when they lose their foothold, they 

 strike their heads against the overarching hood, and are perhaps 

 beaten back too far to recover themselves before they are en- 

 gulfed, or take a zigzag course downward to their destruction. 

 At all events, the long tube of this plant is often found a quarter 

 or half full of dead or decaying insects. That our common 

 Pitcher-Plant carries on the same business less perfectly, though 

 with no different purpose, may be seen by examining any well 

 developed leaf with its tube lined with bristling downward-pointing 

 spines, and half filled with a watery liquid and drowned insects. 



The flower of this plant is certainly a very singular one. 

 The pistil consists of an enormous style, which resembles a par- 

 asol or a toadstool more than anything else, with the stigma in 

 small patches under the tips of its lobes. The petals, notched 

 in like a fiddle, pass out between the re-entrant angles of the 

 expanded style. 



The origin as well as the appropriateness of the English 

 popular name of this plant, the " Side-saddle Flower," appears to 

 be undiscoverable. The generic name was given in honor of Dr. 

 Sarrazin, of Quebec, who, many years ago, first sent specimens 

 of this plant, with some account of its habits, to European bot- 



