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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Discussion. 



Mr. F. W. Burbidge having been asked by the Chairman 

 to make a few remarks, said that he could not well express the 

 sense of pleasure and interest Mr. Veitch's practical and splen- 

 didly illustrated paper had given to him as to others. His few 

 remarks would be confined to Nepenthes as insect traps, and he 

 should say a few words as to the native environment of the rare 

 Nepenthes of Kina Balou. He then observed that in Borneo the 

 natives called the pitchers or urns of Nepenthes " priok-moniet," 

 or monkey's cooking pots, and they were also well aware of their 

 insect-entrapping proclivities. The peptonised fluid of the half- 

 grown pitchers is also used by the Borneans as a sure specific in 

 cases of indigestion, its action being analogous to that of ripe 

 green figs, cheese, rennet, or the lacto-pepsine remedies not 

 unfrequently used with ourselves. When I was staying with the 

 headman of the Kadyans on the Lawas Kiver, his people often 

 gave me delicious rice, cooked in the pitchers of N. Hookeriana, 

 as a sweetmeat to be eaten with jungle fruit and bananas. 

 The question naturally arose as to the practical use these pecu- 

 liar pitchers were to the plants that bore them. There could be 

 no doubt but that Nepenthes pitchers caught and decomposed 

 and digested, in part at least, their insect prey. But why should 

 Nepenthes and other insect-catching plants require an extra 

 supply of nitrogenous food obtained in this peculiar manner? 

 Why should Nepenthes do this when Palms, Arads, or Pelar- 

 goniums can obtain food from the water, air, and soil in the 

 usual way ? As Mr. Veitch had stated, and as every cultivator 

 knew, all insect-catching plants were characterised by their 

 sparse or weakly root system ; and these comparatively few and 

 weakly root fibres were not equal to the strain or demand for 

 food which arose when the plants had to produce flowers and 

 seed. Nature was a hard task-mistress, and sometimes, if not 

 often, she sent forth the fiat to her offspring, " You must either 

 change your mode of life or you must die." This decree had 

 long ago been issued to the Nepenthes, which had had to com- 

 pensate their weak root-action by the peculiar dual development 

 of their foliage leaves. In ordinary leaves absorption of C0 2 

 and its decomposition under sunlight, by the aid of water and 

 earth salts taken up by the roots, was carried on ; but Nepenthes 



