142 MICROSCOPICAL COLLECTIONS IN FLORIDA. 



device that insects may have for climbing glazed surfaces. As a 

 matter of fact no creature comes out of that prison house, unless 

 it be with the single exception of one cunning spider, which in 

 some way finds a safe and rich retreat under the hood of its great 

 vegetable rival. 



The bodies of the captured prey fall into the fluid in the tube 

 and are macerated or decomposed, but without any signs of 

 putrescence. Therefore the plant must at once absorb the ani- 

 mal matter, for otherwise this would cause the infusorial life 

 which-is called putrefaction. 



In order to show the internal structure of the pitcher plant 

 leaf, it will be necessary to separate the cuticle which bears the 

 spines and glands from the rest of the leaf. To do this, pieces 

 cut from the leaf, and preferably those showing the transition 

 from one kind of spines into another, after being soaked in 

 water, may be put into common nitric acid, and this brought up 

 to the boiling point over an alcohol lamp. They should then be 

 immediately washed in several waters, when it will probably be 

 found that the cuticle, both the inner and the outer, has already 

 separated from the parenchyma. The specimens will need no 

 further bleaching, and may be stained either in eosin dissolved 

 in water, or in anilin blue in alcohol. As there is only one kind 

 of tissue to be stained, it will be impossible to get more than one 

 color in them. They should be mounted or kept in water very 

 slightly acidulated with carbolic acid. 



I cannot but regard the pitcher plant as the most highly de- 

 veloped, and the most specialized in its organization of any of 

 the insectivorous plants. It differs more widely from ordinary 

 vegetation, and has more special and adapted contrivances about 

 it, than any of the others. Now as I believe that the truth of 

 the modern evolutionary theory will be eventually brought to a 

 test by well-studied monographs, made by microscopists, on some 

 such highly differentiated organic structures as this pitcher plant, 

 I do not deem it a digression to present here briefly some infer- 

 ences which seem to me to arise from the developmental history 

 of this particular plant. Of course, if the pitcher plant was de- 

 veloped from other and ordinary plants, it had at one time the 



