34 Chapters in Modern Botany CHAP. 



are so many larders, and do not they rifle them? Thus, 

 as in former cases, there would be a play within a play. 



Allied Forms. Not all the species of Utricularia, how- 

 ever, are aquatic ; some, especially in the Tropics, are terres- 

 trial plants. In these, though the booty is of course different, 

 the bladders sometimes borne by the creeping underground 

 stems may capture small terrestrial animals, larval earth- 

 worms, centipedes, and the like, much in the same way 

 as the aquatic species do. The same is true of an allied 

 terrestrial genus (Polypompholix) . The terrestrial bladder- 

 worts usually live in damp places, but some are perched 

 on the mossy stems of trees. For each kind of habitat 

 there are special adaptations : the aquatic forms have 

 sometimes air-reservoirs which act as buoys for the upright 

 flower-stalk; the epiphytes often have water-reservoirs 

 which enable them to survive the dry season ; the ter- 

 restrial species, though rootless like all the others, have 

 little processes or rhizoids which descend into the ground, 

 especially at the base of the flower-stalk, and serve to 

 steady the latter as well as to absorb water. 



Allied to the Utricularia there is another rarer insecti- 

 vorous plant, - Genlisea, which is represented by several 

 species from Brazil, Cuba, and Angola. It lives in marshy 

 places, and, like the bladderwort, is rootless. The stem 

 rises upright from the ground, and is thickly beset with 

 leaves, most of which are spathulate, while others are modi- 

 fied into strange twisted descending staircases. These are 

 long-necked and lined with downward-directed hairs, which 

 at once aid an animal in its entrance and prevent its retreat. 



Pinguicula, Utricularia, and Genlisea all belong to the 

 same order (Lentibulariaceae), and may be grouped, as 

 Gcebel points out, in a series. "We regard,"' he says, 

 " forms like Pinguicula with a rosette of slimy leaves and 

 a central flower-stalk as near the starting-point of the 



