Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/195

Rh stands modern naturalists in good stead vice the personal interference of the mediæval or Miltonic devil, absent on leave.

On most English peaty patches there grows a little reddish-leaved, odd-looking plant, known as sun-dew. It is but an inconspicuous, small weed, and yet literary and scientific honors have been heaped upon its head to an extent almost unknown in the case of any other member of the British floral commonwealth. Mr. Swinburne has addressed an ode to it, and Mr. Darwin has written a learned book about it. Its portrait has been sketched by innumerable artists, and its biography narrated by innumerable authors. And all this attention has been showered upon it, not because it is beautiful, or good, or modest, or retiring, but simply and solely because it is atrociously and deliberately wicked. Like the late Mr. Peace and the heroes of the Newgate Calendar, it owes its vogue entirely to its murderous propensities. Sundew, in fact, is the best known and most easily accessible of the carnivorous and insectivorous plants.

The leaf of the sun-dew is round and flat, and is covered by a number of small red glands, which act as the attractive advertisement to the misguided midges. Their knobby ends are covered with a glutinous secretion, which glistens like honey in the sunlight, and so gains for the plant its common English name. But the moment a hapless fly, attracted by hopes of meat or nectar, settles quietly in its midst, on hospitable thoughts intent, the viscid liquid holds him tight immediately, and clogs his legs and wings, so that he is snared exactly as a peregrine is snared with bird-lime. Then the leaf with all its "red-lipped mouths" (I will own up that the expression is Mr. Swinburne's, ubi supra) closes over him slowly but surely, and crushes him by folding its edges inward gradually toward the center. The fly often lingers long with ineffectual struggles, while the cruel crawling leaf pours forth a digestive fluid—a vegetable gastric juice, as it were—and dissolves him alive piecemeal in its hundred clutching suckers, I have seen this mute tragedy enacted a thousand times over on the bogs and moorlands; and, though I often try to release the fresh flies from their ghastly living but inanimate prison, it is impossible to go round all the plants on a whole common, like a philodipterous Howard, ameliorating the condition of all the victims of misplaced confidence in the good intentions of the treacherous sun-dew.

Our little English insectivorous plants, however (we have at least five or six such species in our own islands), are mere clumsy bunglers compared to the great and highly developed insect-eaters of the tropics, which stand to them in somewhat the same relation as the Bengal tiger stands to the British wild-cat or the skulking weasel. The Indian pitcher-plants or Nepenthes bear big pitchers of very classical shapes (it is well known that Greek art has largely affected India), closed in the early state with a lid, which lifts itself and opens the pitcher as soon as the plant has fully completed its insecticidal