266 
SCIENCE. 
held by this sticky substance until they die. The nutritious 
matter is then dissolved out by an acid secretion, and is 
ultimately absorbed into the substance of the plant by the 
glands on the leaf. The edge of a leaf when excited by a 
capture will bend over upon it for a short time ; merely for 
the purpose, I think, of more effectually securing it, and of 
bathing it in the secretions. The calyx and flower-stalk, as 
I have already mentioned, are thickly covered with the same 
mushroom glands that are found more sparingly on the 
leaves. I have never seen any evidence that the flower ap- 
pendages take any part in the digestion of insects. They 
seem to be rather in the nature of an ornamentation than of 
anything useful. For exhibition, therefore, or lor double- 
staining, the calyx and flower stem will be found by far the 
most attractive part of the plant. The best way to preserve 
them, as well as all such small material, until wanted for 
use, is to put them green into a common morphia vial with 
a few drops each, of alcohol and water, and then to cork 
and seal them up tight with melted beeswax. To prepare 
them for the slide these objects may be treated precisely as 
recommended for sections of castor-oil plant, but should 
be mounted in a weak solution of glycerine in camphorated 
water. 
If cells are made of rings punched out of the thin sheets 
of colored wax, used by artificial flower makers, and then 
coated with either liquid marine glue, or a mixture in equal 
parts of gold size and gum damar, dissolved in benzole, 
this method of liquid mounting may be as easily and safely 
performed as mounting in balsam. In very many cases 
simple water, made antiseptic in any manner, will be found 
far preferable to any other media, both for retaining the full 
and distended forms of minute organs, and for bringing out 
the delicate markings of vegetable structure which the 
highly refractive balsam would entirely obliterate. 
There is only one other insectivorous plant found in 
Florida — the pitcher plant — Sarracenia variolaris , a species 
growing only in the South-Atlantic States. It is found in 
low and wet places among the open pine-barrens, but is not 
as abundant as the others which have been mentioned. The 
leaf is a hollow, conical or trumpet-shaped tube, with a 
flange or wing running up one side, and a hood which 
arches over the orifice of the tube. During the growing 
season this tube is usually more than half filled with water, 
which we must suppose secreted by the plant itself, because 
the hood effectually sheds all rain-water from it. Crowded 
into the bottom of the tubes of mature leaves, we shall al- 
most invariably find a mass of the hard and indigestible 
parts of insects. These creatures have been in some way 
attracted into that suspicious looking receptacle, and once 
in have been unable to get out again A mere partially 
covered tube, however, with a little water in it, is by no 
means a fly-trap. Notone insect in a hundred would fall 
into that well and drown, if there were not some special 
device absolutely preventing it from crawling upward. 
Now a microscopical examination of the inside of the hood 
and tube of the pitcher plant reveals the most skillul con- 
trivances for securing insect prey that could possibly be 
imagined. In the first place, there are in the upper part 
of the receptacle and about the mouth, great numbers of 
sessile glands which secrete abundantly a sweet fluid, very 
attracting to ants and flies. Further, tbere is on the inner 
surface of the hood and mouth, a formidable array of com- 
paratively long pike-pointed spines, all pointing backward 
and downward. These grade off into a shorter, more blunt, 
but still exceedingly sharp-pointed spines, which overlap 
each other like tiles on the roof of a house. This kind of 
coating lines the tube for a third of the way down, the 
spines growing finer until at last they grade off into regular 
hairs which line all the lower part ot the tube ; spines and 
hairs all pointing downward. An insect attempting to re- 
trace its steps after its ambrosial feast, would find nothing 
which it could penetrate or grasp with the hooklets ot its 
feet ; and the wetness of the spines, from the constantly 
overflowing glands, would probably prevent it from making 
use of any other device that insects may have for climbing 
glazed surfaces. As a matter of fact no creature comes out 
of that prison-house, unless it be with the single exception 
of one cunning spider, which in some way finds a safe and 
rich retreat under the hood of its great vegeiable rival. 
The bodies of the captured prey fall into the fluid in the 
tube and are macerated or decomposed, but without any 
signs of putrescence. Therefore the plant must at once ab- 
sorb the animal matter, for otherwise this would cause the 
infusorial life, which is called putrefaction. 
In order to show the internal structure of the pitcher-plant 
leaf, it will be necessary to separate the cuticle which bears 
the spines and glands from the rest of the leaf. To do this, 
pieces cut from the leaf, and preferably those showing the 
transition from one kind of spines into another, after being 
soaked in water, may be put into common nitric acid, and 
this brought up to the boiling point over an alcohol lamp. 
They should then be immediately washed in several waters, 
when it will probably be found that the cuticle, both the 
inner and the outer, has already separated from the paren- 
chyma. The specimens will need no further bleaching, and 
may be stained either in eosin, dissolved in water, or in 
anilin blue in alcohol. As there is only one kind of tissue 
to be stained, it will be impossible to get more than one 
color in them. They should be mounted, or kept in water 
very slightly acidulated with carbolic acid. 
I cannot but regard the pitcher plant as the most highly 
developed, and the most specialized in its organization of 
an}' of the insectivorous plants. It differs more widely 
from ordinary vegetation, and has more special and adapted 
contrivances about it, than any of the others. Now, as I 
believe that the truth of the modern evolutionary theory 
will be eventually brought to the test by well-studied mono- 
graphs, made by microscopists, on some such highly dif- 
ferentiated organic structures as this pitcher plant, I do not 
deem it a digression to present here briefly some inferences 
which seem to me to arise from the developmental history 
of this particular plant. Of course, if the pitcher plant was 
developed from other and ordinary plants, it had at one time 
the simple plain leaves of common herbs. It must have 
early commenced in some way, to appropriate insect food 
on these leaves, because every essential change was for the 
betterment of the plant in this respect. The stem of the 
leaves soon began to put out flanges or wings on each side 
— the phyllodia of the botanists, which are not uncommon 
among plants. And these outspread wings must have as- 
sisted in the absorption of insect food that was washed down 
among them. Then the edges of the wings turned up, and 
curved around towards each other, until finally they met 
and grew together, forming a tube and a much more com- 
plete receptacle for decomposing animal bodies. A South 
American genus, the Heliamphora , is just in this condition 
at the present time. Then from some unknown cause and 
in a way exceedingly difficult to explain, our Sarracema 
changed entirely its manner of capturing insects. The leaf 
bent over the orifice of the tube, forming the hood, and 
those remarkable spines and tiled plates were developed on 
the inside of the hood and tube, growing backwards, con- 
trary to the order of Nature. When all this was accom- 
plished and fully completed, but not before, our plant could 
commence its career as the most successful trappist of either 
the vegetable or the animal kingdom. 
Now, according to the Darwinian theory, all these trans- 
formations were the result of innumerable slight and acci- 
dental variations, each one of which happened to be so 
beneficial to the particular plant concerned, that it got the 
start of all the others, and every time run them all out of ex - 
istence. One cannot tell how many million times this ex- 
tinction and reproduction must have occured, before our 
marvellously perfect little fly-trap was finally produced. 
Excuse me if I confess that not all the canonical books of 
Darwin are sufficient to make me put faith in the miracles 
of accidental evolution. I believe in the fact of the gradual 
development of the organic kingdoms ; for all science 
teaches it. But I believe it was governed and guided by 
forces more potent than accident or chance. The Being, or 
the first cause, if you will, that originated the simple ele- 
ments of matter, and endowed them with the power and the 
tendency to aggregate into developing worlds, might equally 
as well have endowed certain of them with the power and 
the tendency to aggregate into ever advancing organisms. 
There is no chance, in the myriad forms of crystalline and 
chemical substances ; then why should there be in the 
scarcely more varied colloid forms of living matter ? In a 
world that unfolds from chaos in one steady line of pro- 
gress, that shows only design at every advancing stage, I 
must logically place somewhere at its commencement the 
Almighty fiat of a Designer. 
