TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 105 
This Cureulio being of a resolute nature, attempted to eat his way out; ‘ when 
discovered he was still alive, and had made a small hole through the side of the 
leaf, but was evidently becoming very weak. On opening the leaf, the fluid was 
found in considerable quantity around him, and was without doubt gradually over- 
coming him. The leaf being again allowed to close upon him, he soon died ”*. 
At the Meeting of this Association last year, Dr. Burdon Sanderson made a 
communication, which, from its remarkable character, was well worthy of the 
singular history of this plant ; one by no means closed yet, but in which his obser- 
yations will head a most interesting chapter. It is a generalization (now almost a 
household word) that all living things have a common bond of union in a sub- 
stance (always present where life manifests itself) which underlies all their details 
of structure. This is called protoplasm. One of its most distinctive properties is 
its aptitude to contract ; and when in any given organism the particles of proto- 
plasm are so arranged that they act as it were in concert, they produce a cumulative 
effect which is very manifest in its results. Such a manifestation is found in the 
contraction of muscle; and such a manifestation we possibly have also in the con- 
traction of the leaf of Dionea. 
_ The contraction of muscle is well known to be accompanied by certain electrical 
phenomena. When we place a fragment of muscle in connexion with a delicate 
alvanometer, we find that between the outside surface and a cut surface there is a 
definite current, due to what is called the electromotive force of the muscle. Now 
when the muscle is made to contract this electromotive force momentarily dis- 
appears. The needle of the galvanometer, deflected before, swings back towards 
the point of rest; there is what is called a negative variation. All students of the 
vegetable side of organized nature were astonished to hear from Dr. Sanderson that 
experiments which he had made proved to demonstration that when a leaf of 
Dionea contracts, the effects produced are precisely similar to those which occur 
when muscle contracts f. 
Not merely, then, are the phenomena of digestion in this wonderful plant like 
mace of animals, but the phenomena of contractility agree with those of animals 
also. 
DRoSsERA. 
Not confined to a single district in the New World, but distributed over the 
temperate parts of both hemispheres, in sandy and marshy Biorve are the curious 
gee called Sundews—the species of the genus Drosera. ey are now known to 
@ near congeners of Dionea, a fact which was little more than guessed at when 
the curious habits which I am about to describe were first discovered. 
Within a year of each other two persons (one an Englishman, the other a 
German) observed that the curious hairs which everyone notices on the leaf of 
Drosera were sensitive. ‘This is the account which Mr. Gardom, a Derbyshire 
botanist, gives of what his friend Mr. Whateley, “an eminent London surgeon” f, 
made out in 1780 :—“On inspecting some of the contracted leaves we observed a 
small insect or fly very closely imprisoned therein, which occasioned some astonish- 
ment as to how it happened to get into so confined a situation. Afterwards, on 
Mr. Whateley’s centrically pressing with a pin other leaves yet in their natural and 
expanded form, we olseived a remarkable sudden and elastic spring of the leaves, 
so as to become inverted upwards and, as it were, encircling the pin, which evi- 
dently showed the method by which the fly came into its embarrassing situation ”§. 
This must have been an account given from memory, and represents the movement 
of the hairs as much more rapid than it really is. 
In July of the preceding year (though the account was not published till two 
years afterwards) Roth, in Germany, had remarked in Drosera rotundifolia and 
longifolia “that many leayes were folded together from the point towards the base, 
and that all the hairs were bent like a bow, but that there was no apparent change 
* Notes on Dionea muscipula, Ellis. Meehan’s ‘ Gardeners’ Monthly,’ 1868, pp. 229-31. 
_ ‘+ See Brit. Assoc. Report, 1873, Trans. Sect. p. 183; Proc. Royal Soe. vol. xxi. p. 495 ; 
Nature, June 11 & 18, 1874. 
¢ Darwin, ‘Botanic Garden,’ pt. ii. p. 24. 
§ Withering’s ‘ Arrangement of British Plants,’ 3rd ed. (1796) p. 825. 
