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PAXTON'S FLOWER GARDEN. 



The so-called pitchers are in reality the leaves of this plant, in a very singular 

 condition ; the pitcher itself being the leaf -stalk, and the cover its blade. By what mode of 

 development this kind of structure is produced has never yet been conclusively shown. It 

 has been thought that the pitcher is formed by the folding together, in its earliest infancy, 

 of the two sides of a flat leaf-stalk, the line of which union is indicated by a firm elevated rib, 

 which proceeds from the base to the opening of the pitcher, as if to stiffen and sustain it ; 

 but this is not certain, and it is more probable that the pitcher is the result of a hollowing 

 process, coeval with the first growth of the pitcher itself, and analogous to that which 

 produces the hip of the rose, or the cup at the bottom of the calyx of Eschscholtzia, or the 

 cups that appear accidentally upon cabbage-leaves. 



If the exact nature of the pitcher is thus undecided, we are still further from a know- 

 ledge of the use for which so singular an apparatus is destined. To the common idea, that 

 Nature intended it to hold water, arise these objections : that water is not found in the 

 pitcher except after rains or heavy dews, and that plants which grow naturally in bogs can 

 hardly require any unusual apparatus for supplying them with water. Others think that the 

 pitcher is a contrivance for detaining insects in captivity till they perish and decay, the 

 putrefaction of these creatures conducing to the nutrition of the plant. But there is no 

 apparent reason why the Side- Saddle flower should require this sort of special nutriment 

 more than rts- neighbours in the same bogs, which have no pitchers. This, . however, is 

 certain, that if the pitchers were intended for fly-traps, they could hardly have been more 

 ingeniously contrived. It is the honey of the mouth of the pitcher that tempts the 

 insects to their destruction; and, accordingly, they are found in abundance at the bottom. 

 In the plant now before us we count, in the month of February, about a dozen, two of 

 which are wasps ; and Mr. Croom says that he found in one of his a large butterfly 

 (Papilio Turnus) . Reversed hairs keep them there without hope of escape. As the sides of 

 the pitchers consist of very lax cellular tissue, containing large cavities in every direction, 

 and as starch-grains in abundance escape from the sides when wounded, it is a question 

 whether this starch, converted into sugar by the vital force of the pitcher, may not serve to 

 sweeten the water in which' the imprisoned insects meet a miserable end. 



