56 Chapters in Modern Botany CHAP. 



of the Botanic Garden, than whom these plants have never 

 had a more experienced cultivator, led to a mutual confes- 

 sion of diminished certitude. Mr. Lindsay had often been 

 annoyed by the deterioration of specimens of Nepenthes 

 lent to flower shows, until it occurred to him that this might 

 be due to the loss of the fluid in transit. He gave orders 

 that the next plants so treated should have their pitchers 

 refilled to the proper level on arriving at the show, and 

 again on their return ; and when this was done he was 

 gratified to find that the plants no longer suffered. Hence 

 then the fluid is of importance to the plant itself; the 

 pitcher seems a reservoir of the water of transpiration. It 

 is hardly necessary here to recall the distillation of dew 

 from plants by night ; the gemmed leaf-tips of the lady's 

 mantle should be familiar to every one who has ever taken 

 a morning stroll along a dewy lane, while every grower of 

 hothouse arums and the like is familiar with the dropping 

 which goes on from the leaf-tips. In 1885 Kny and 

 Zimmermann called attention to the very considerable 

 development in the veins of the Nepenthes leaf of cells 

 of that spirally thickened type which is associated with the 

 carriage of water, and speculated as to its importance for 

 the -internal water supply of the plant; while Maury in 1887 

 insisted that the secreting glands of the Cephalotus pitcher 

 were not the special and essential adaptations towards insect 

 capture and digestion, as which they are commonly de- 

 scribed, but mere " water-stomata, which play the part of 

 regulators of transpiration, which give off water when there 

 is an excess, and take it up again when there is a deficiency." 

 Again, " the presence of fluid up to a certain level is the 

 sole cause of the uniformity and polish of the epidermis ; 

 one should not see in it a surface specialised as detentive 

 for insects." He denies the digestive agency of the fluid, 

 finds indeed drowned insects, but also infusorians, green 



