418 The American Naturalist. [May, 
that the cups were more than half filled, there can be little 
doubt on this ground. : 
To obviate this objection the experiment was repeated in 
another way. Two cups were taken, the one from Nepenthes 
distillatoria and the other from N. hirsuta, which were still 
closed but appeared to be just ready to open. Considerable 
secretion was present. The cups were not separated from the 
parent plants. The wall of the cup was sterilized with a sub- 
limate solution which was washed away with sterilized water. 
Then a small V shaped opening was cut in the wall above the 
surface of the liquid. Through this opening in the wall of the 
cup a piece of sterilized egg albumen one centimeter long and © 
one millimeter thick was introduced into the cup of N. hirsuta 
and a piece } cm. long and 1 mm. thick, into that of N. distil- 
latoria. The openings in the walls were then covered with 
pieces of court plaster, and these for protection from the 
moisture of the culture house were covered with varnish. 
After four days the cups opened. The pieces of egg albumen 
were unchanged, not even the corners being rounded off. 
Pepsin was not present in the secretion and bacteria only in 
very small numbers. 
The secretion from each cup was then poured out into ster- 
ilized test tubes containing small pieces of white of egg, and 
they were set aside at a temperature of 20-22° C. The white 
of egg in the secretion from N. distillatoria was dissolved in 
four days, that in the secretion of N. hirsuta in five. At the 
same time enormous quantities of bacteria were developed. 
After finishing these experiments the author noticed an 
article in the Comptes Rendus for 1890, by Dubois, who had 
experimented with the secretions of various Nepenthes spe- 
cies taken before the cups had opened. Dubois’s results agree 
with those of Tischutkin. The secretion taken from the cups 
just as they were ready to open did not contain pepsin and 
did not affect the cubes of albumen. But after having been 
exposed to the air for some time, putrefaction commenced and 
the resultant liquid contained traces of pepsin. Dubois draws 
the following conclusions from his experiments. : 
