156 CHARLES DARWIN 



Bell's idea is completely pulverised by the apt allegation 

 of analogous expressions in the animal world. In his 

 old age Darwin grew, in fact, only the more ceaselessly 

 and wonderfully industrious. In 1875, after three 

 years of comparative silence, came the ' Insectivorous 

 Plants,' a work full of minute observation on the 

 habits and manners of the sundew, the butterwort, the 

 Venus's fly-catcher, and the various heterogeneous bog- 

 haunting species known by the common name of 

 pitcher plants. The bare mass and weight of the facts 

 which Darwin had collected for the ' Origin of Species ' 

 might well-nigh have stifled the very existence of that 

 marvellous <book : it was lucky that the premature 

 publication of Wallace's paper compelled him to hurry 

 on his ' brief abstract,' for if he had waited to select 

 and arrange the whole series of observations that he 

 finally published in his various later justificatory 

 volumes, we might have looked in vain for the great 

 systematic and organising work, which would no doubt 

 have been ' surcharged with its own weight, and 

 strangled with its waste fertility.' But the task that 

 he himself best loved was to watch in minute detail 

 the principles whose secret he had penetrated, and 

 whose reserve he had broken, working themselves out 

 before his very eyes, naked and not ashamed to catch 

 Actaeon-like the undraped form of nature herself in the 

 actual process of her inmost being. He could patiently 

 observe the red and slimy hair-glands of the drosera 

 closing slowly and remorselessly round the insect prey, 

 and sucking from their bodies with sensitive tentacles 

 the protoplasmic juices denied to its leaves by the poor 

 and boggy soil, on which alone its scanty rootlets can 



