NEPENTHES DISTILLATORIA. 
3 
light is admitted to them. Our plants do not, it is true, often enjoy the direct rays 
of the sun, still their situation is very light, and they seem so much at home in it 
that we may liken them to a little forest, progressing in all its native luxuriance. 
We have measured different parts of the 
plant, and find the following to be the re- 
sult : — Height more than twenty feet ; 
length of the fullest grown pitchers, from 
the base to the rim of the mouth, six to 
nine inches ; circumference at the broadest 
part, five inches ; length of the leaf, two 
feet ; breadth of ditto, three inches. We 
have found the opened and unopened 
pitchers to contain a more or less quantity 
of pure sweet water, and invariably we find 
the opened ones to contain insects, but 
whether this goes to strengthen the sup- 
position that this fluid is intended to decoy 
them we are unable to say. 
It has been asserted, and with some pro- 
bable truth, that this liquid is a secretion 
from the minute glandular scales by which 
the lower half of every pitcher is hned. 
" Dr. Turner analysed the contents of a 
large one, and found it to emit, while boiling, 
an odour like baked apples, from containing 
a trace of vegetable matter, and he found 
it yield minute crystals of super-oxalate of 
potash on being slowly evaporated to dry- 
ness:'—Bof. Mag, 2798. 
For further accounts of the supposed 
uses of this extraordinary feature of vege- 
table life, we refer the reader to pages 57 
and 58 of the first volume of this Magazine. And as an esteemed author observes, 
that few indeed are the phenomena attending plants, either in their structure or 
their economy, which we can satisfactorily explain ; everything, however, tends to 
make this grand truth more evident and more indisputable, that God in infinite 
wisdom and goodness has made them all. 
The accompanying diagram is intended to show the sort of trellis used in training 
