SUNDEW AND BUTTERWORT. 131 



of a long neck, capped by a little globular crimson gland 

 as big as a pinhead. Some of the leaves have folded 

 over their edges or rolled in upon themselves ; and if 

 you open them you will find in the centre two or three 

 decaying carcasses of flies. Whenever the insect lights 

 upon the blade, attracted by the bright red glands with 

 their honey-like secretion, he gets clogged at once by the 

 sticky hairs, and cannot drag himself away from the cor- 

 rosive acid for all his frantic efforts. For my own part, 

 I cannot watch the poor creature struggling to free his 

 legs and wings from this horrible, impassive, blood-suck- 

 ing plant without at once assisting him out of his 

 trouble ; for my instincts will not allow me to appraise 

 the " divine dexterity" of nature in causing destruction 

 so highly as some of our idealistic humanitarians have 

 done ; it is impossible not to feel a little thrill of horror 

 at this battle between the sentient and the insentient, 

 where the insentient always wins this combination of 

 seeming cunning and apparent hunger for blood on the 

 part of a rooted, inanimate plant against a breathing, 

 flying, conscious insect. But with a little bit of raw 

 beef one can see the whole process just as well, and far 

 less cruelly ; for after all, man shrinks from seeing what 

 unconscious nature does not shrink from designing with 

 minute prevision and care. As soon as the fragment of 

 meat is placed upon the leaf, the clubbed ends of the 

 glandular tentacles hold it fast by their sticky secretion, 

 and the other tentacles around bend over to enclose it, 

 exactly as the arms of a polyp sweep together to catch 

 their floating prey. If you put a dead innutritions ob- 

 ject on the blade, the glands bend over at first, but 

 shortly relax again ; when the object is a living fly, how- 

 ever, they clasp it tightly, and the more it struggles the 

 more it excites the surrounding tentacles to close over it 



