Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/194

182 fruitlet as soon as it is duly impregnated. Afterward, the pollen is shed upon their backs by the bursting of the pollen-bags; the hairs wither up, and open the previously barricaded exit, and the midges issue forth in search of a new prison and a second drop of honey. This is all strange enough; but stranger still, I strongly suspect the arum of deliberately hocusing its nectar. I have often seen dozens of these tiny flies rolling together in an advanced stage of apparent intoxication upon the pollen-covered floor of an arum-chamber; and the evidences of drunkenness are so clear and numerous that I incline to believe the plant actually makes them drunk in order to insure their staggering about in the pollen and carrying a good supply of it to the next blossom visited. It is a curious fact that these two totally unrelated plants (birthwort and arum) should have hit upon the very same device to attract insects of the same class (though not the same species). The trap must have been independently developed in the two cases, and could only have succeeded with such very stupid, unintelligent creatures as the flies and midges.

From plants that imprison insects to plants that devour insects alive is a natural transition. The giant who keeps a dungeon is first-cousin to the ogre who swallows down his captives entire. And yet the subject is really too serious a one for jesting; there is something too awful and appalling in this contest of the unconscious and insentient with the living and feeling, of a lower vegetative form of life with a higher animated form, that it always make me shudder slightly to think of it. Do you remember Victor Hugo's terrible description (I think it is in "Quatre-Vingt-Treize") of the duel between the great gun that has got loose from its chains on a ship in a storm, and the men who try to recapture it? Do you remember how the gun lunges, and tilts, and evades, and charges, exactly as if it were a living, sentient creature; and yet all the while the full horror of the thing depends upon the very fact that it is nothing more than a piece of lifeless, senseless metal, driven about on its wheels irresponsibly by the fury of the storm? Well, that description is awful and horrible enough; but it yet lacks one element of awesomeness which is present in the insect-eating plants, and that is the clear evidence of deliberate design and adaptation. When a crumbling cliff falls and crushes to death the creatures on the beach beneath it, we see in their fate only the accidental working of the fixed and unintentional laws of nature; but when a plant is so constructed, with minute cunning and deceptive imitativeness, that it continually and of malice prepense lures on the living insect, generation after generation, to a lingering death in its unconscious arms, there seems to be a sort of fiendish impersonal cruelty about its action which sadly militates against all our pretty platitudes about the beauty and perfection of living beings. It is quite a relief that we are able nowadays to shelve off the responsibility upon a dead materialistic law like natural selection or survival of the fittest. Hartmann's