102 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XLII 



sessile haustoria upon some of its early roots and be- 

 comes partly parasitic in the same manner as do the mem- 

 bers of group I, the structure and habit of which it then 

 closely resembles. Second, it resorts bodily and sud- 

 denly to underground life by burrowing into the soil, 

 where it becomes an intricate mass, often very large, of 

 blanched stems and branches. Third, it abandons its 

 early roots with their sessile haustoria, develops new 

 pediculate haustoria from its underground stem and 

 branches and becomes completely parasitic. Fourth, it 

 changes some of its numerous aborted leaves into inge- 

 nious traps with which it captures minute animal forms 

 and adds them to its other ill-gotten subsistence. Fifth, 

 almost suggestive of atonement for a groveling life, it 

 provides for the normal germination of its offspring 

 by sending above ground a few specialized branches which 

 produce perfect flowers and seed and then die, while 

 the underground parts live perennially. That series of 

 changes of structure and habitude within the life-history 

 of a single plant has no known parallel in the vegetable 

 kingdom. The changes have no apparent relevancy with 

 one another until the closing one of the series, parturital 

 reproduction, restores the normal phenogamous condition 

 for a new reproductive cycle and a new series of the 

 abnormal changes. All these changes of structure and 

 habitude are invariable in character and invariably heri- 

 table. So far as is now known they are confined to a 

 single species, and the structure of no other known plant 

 offers any suggestion of their gradual origination. In 

 view of such facts as these, all of which have been attested 

 by competent observers, one may reasonably believe that 

 not only this form, but all the forms of phenogamous 

 parasites, have originated suddenly. 



Although groups I, II and III are, by their respective 

 methods of parasitism, clearly distinct from one another 

 and from normal plants, parasitism is not physically man- 

 ifested in any of them until after germination is com- 

 pleted, because the embryo of every member of each of 



