Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/196

184. In some kinds the pitcher ludicrously resembles a hot-water jug of modern British manufacture. The details of the trap vary somewhat in the different species, but as a whole the modus operandi of the plant is somewhat after this atrocious fashion: The pitcher contains a quantity of liquid, that of the sort appropriately known as the Rajah holding as much as a quart; and the insect, attracted in most cases by some bright color, crawls down the sticky side, quaffs the unkind Nepenthe, and forgets his troubles forthwith in the vat of oblivion prepared for him beneath by the delusive vases. A slimy Lethe flows over his dissolving corse, and the relentless pitcher-plant sucks his juices to supply his own fibers with the necessary nitrogenous materials.

The Californian pitcher-plant, or Darlingtonia, is a member of a totally distinct family, which has independently hit upon the same device in the Western world as the Indian Nepenthes in the Eastern hemisphere. The pitcher in this case, though differently produced, is hooded and lidded like its Oriental analogue; but the inside of the hood is furnished with short hairs, all pointing inward, and legibly inscribed (to the botanical eye) with the appropriate motto, "Vestigia nulla retrorsum." The whole arrangement is colored dingy orange, so as to attract the attention of flies, and it contains a viscid digestive fluid in which the flies are first drowned and then slowly melted and assimilated. The pitchers are often found half full of dead and decaying assorted insects. This circumstance, of course, has not escaped the sharp eyes of the practically minded Californians, who accordingly keep the pitchers growing in their houses, to act as flycatchers. Such an ingenious utilization of nature, in unconscious competition with the papier moule, would surely have occurred only to the two great Pacific civilizations of the Californian and the heathen Chinese.

There are a great many more of these highly developed insect-eaters, such as the Guiana heliamphora (more classical shapes), the Australian cephalotus, and the American side-saddle flowers, and they all without exception grow in very wet and boggy places, like our own sun-dews, butterworts, and bladderworts. The reason why so many marsh-plants have taken to these strange insect-eating habits is simply that their roots are often very badly supplied with manure or with ammonia in any form; and, as no plant can get on without these necessaries of life (in the strictest sense), only those marshy weeds have any chance of surviving which can make up in one way or another for the native deficiencies of their situation. The sun-dews show us, as it were, the first stage in the acquisition of these murderous habits; the pitcher-plants are the abandoned ruffians which have survived among all their competitors in virtue of their exceptional ruthlessness and deceptive coloration. I ought to add that in all cases the pitchers are not flowers, but highly modified and altered leaves, though in many