TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 111 
trumpet-shaped tubes, with yery oblique open mouths, the dorsal lip of which is 
drawn out into a long, slender, arching, scarlet hood, that hardly closes the mouth. 
The slight twist in the tube causes these mouths to point in various directions, and 
they entrap very small insects only. Before arriving at a state of maturity the 
plant bears -much larger, suberect pitchers, also twisted, with the lip produced into 
a large inflated hood, that completely arches over a very small entrance to the 
cavity of the pitcher. A singular orange-red, flabby, two-lobed organ hangs from 
the end of the hood, right in front of the entrance, which, as I was informed last 
week by letter from Professor Asa Gray, is smeared with honey on its inner surface, 
These pitchers are crammed with large insects, especially moths, which decompcse 
in them, and result in a putrid mass. I have no information of water being found 
in its pitchers in its native country, but have myself found a slight acid secretion 
in the young states of both forms of pitcher. : 
The tissues of the inner surfaces of the pitchers of both the young and old plant 
I find to be very similar to those of Sarracenia variolaris and S. flava. 
Looking at a flowering specimen of Darlingtonia, I was struck with a remarkable 
analogy between the arrangement and colouring of the parts of the leaf and of the 
flower. The petals are as highly coloured as the flap of the pitcher, and between 
each pair of petals is a hole (formed by a notch in the opposed margins of each) 
leading to the stamens and stigma. Turning to the pitcher, the relation of its flap 
to its entrance is somewhat similar. Now we know that coloured petals are spe- 
cially attractive organs, and that the object of their colour is to bring insects to 
feed on the pollen or nectar, and in this case, by means of the hole, to fertilize the 
flower ; and that the object of the flap and its sugar is also to attract insects, but 
with a very different result, cannot be doubted. It is hence conceivable that this 
marvellous plant lures insects to its flowers for one object, and feeds them while it 
uses them to fertilize itself, and that, this accomplished, some of its benefactors are 
thereafter lured to its pitchers for the sake of feeding itself! 
But to return from mere conjecture to scientific earnest, I cannot dismiss Dar- 
lingtonia without pointing out to you what appears to me a most curious point in 
its history; which is, that the change from the slender, tubular, open-mouthed, to 
the inflated closed-mouthed pitchers is, in all the specimens which | haye examined, 
absolutely sudden in the individual plant. I find no pitchers in an intermediate 
stage of development. This, a matter of no little significance in itself, derives ad- 
ditional interest from the fact that the young pitchers to a certain degree represent 
those of the Sarracenias with open mouths and erect lids, and the old pitchers 
those of the Sarracenias with closed mouths and globoselids, The combination of 
representative characters in an outlying species of a small order cannot but be re- 
garded as a marvellously significant fact in the view of those morphologists who 
hold the doctrine of evolution, 
NEPENTHES. 
The genus Nepenthes consists of upwards of 30 species of climbing half shrubby 
plants, natives of the hotter parts of the Asiatic Archipelago from Borneo to Cey- 
lon, with a few outlying species in New Caledonia, in Tropical Australia, and in 
the Seychelle Islands on the African coast. Its pitchers are abundantly produced, 
especially during the younger state of the plants. They present very considerable 
modifications of form and external structure, and vary greatly in size, from little 
more than an inch to almost a foot in length; one species, indeed, which I have 
here from the mountains of Borneo, has pitchers which, including the lid, measure 
a foot and a half, and its capacious bowl is large enough to drown a small qua- 
druped or bird. 
e structure of the pitcher of Nepenthes is less complicated on the whole than 
that of Sarracenia, though some of its tissues are — more highly specialized. 
The pitcher itself is here not a transformed leaf, as in Sarracenia, nor is it a trans- 
formed leaf-blade, like that of Dionea, but an appendage of the leaf developed at 
-its tip, and answers to a water-secreting gland that may be seen terminating the 
mid-rib of the leaf of certain plants. It is furnished with a stalk, often a very long 
one, which, in the case of pitchers formed on leaves high up the stem, has (before 
the full development of the pitcher) the power of twisting like a tendril round 
