THE STRUCTURE OF THE PITCHER PLANT. 13 
down the flue may so disturb the nervous sleeper that he is 
determined to be rid of such an annoyance; he accordingly 
prepares in the habitation of these birds a fire of straw ; the 
parents of the unfledged young flee in dismay, and rise above 
their smoking tenement and wheel about in terror, then dive 
down near its top as though they would rescue their suffo- 
cating brood from a death so awful. At last their courage 
gone they turn and soar away above the scene, while their 
young drop one by one in the fire below, and the parental 
feelings of the old birds induce them to linger about their 
desolate home for many days. To obviate this inhuman 
practice, a board placed on the top of the chimney before 
they commence breeding is all that is necessary. 

THE STRUCTURE OF THE PITCHER PLANT. 
BY J. G. HUNT, M.D. 
re 
* High among the mountains, 
Nepenthe's pitchers weep. 
Asnour twenty species of the genus Nepenthes are known 
to botanists, and while some are natives of swamps in 
Africa and China, most of the species are found on Mount 
Kinau Ballou, in the Island of Borneo, growing at an eleva- 
tion of from three to eight thousand facts above the sea. The 
species whose minute anatomy we partially describe, is the 
Nepenthes distillatoria, found growing in China and at the 
Cape of Good Hope. This plant often attains the length of 
ten or twelve feet, generally lying prostrate, or partially 
supported by other plants. It bathes its roots in the hot 
swamps near the coast, but cannot lift its flowers very high 
in the sunshine, because its branching stem which bears 
many long and partly clasping leaves, and also its precious 
