_Drosera rotundifolia_
_Flowers_--Small, white, growing in a 1-sided, curved raceme of buds
chiefly. Calyx usually 5-parted; usually 5 petals, and as many stamens
as petals; usually 3 styles, but 2-cleft, thus appearing to be twice as
many. _Scape:_ 4 to 10 in. high. _Leaves:_ Growing in an open rosette on
the ground; round or broader, clothed with reddish bristly hairs tipped
with purple glands, and narrowed into long, flat, hairy petioles; young
leaves curled like fern fronds.
_Preferred Habitat_--Bogs, sandy and sunny marshes.
_Flowering Season_--July-August.
_Distribution_--Labrador to the Gulf of Mexico and westward. From Alaska
to California. Europe and Asia.
Here is a bloodthirsty little miscreant that lives by reversing the
natural order of higher forms of life preying upon lower ones, an
anomaly in that the vegetable actually eats the animal. The dogbane, as
we shall see, simply catches the flies that dare trespass upon the
butterflies’ preserves, for excellent reasons of its own; the Silenes
and phloxes, among others, spread their calices with a sticky gum that
acts as limed twigs do to birds, in order to guard the nectar secreted
for flying benefactors from pilfering ants; the honey bee being an
imported, not a native, insect, and therefore not perfectly adapted to
the milkweed, occasionally gets entrapped by it; the big bumblebee is
sometimes fatally imprisoned in the moccasin flower’s gorgeous tomb--the
punishment of insects that do not benefit the flowers is infinite in its
variety. But the local Venus’s flytrap (_Dionaea muscipula_), gathered
only from the low savannas in North Carolina to entertain the owners of
hothouses as it promptly closes the crushing trap at the end of its
sensitive leaves over a hapless fly, and the common sundew that tinges
the peat-bogs of three continents with its little reddish leaves, belong
to a distinct class of carnivorous plants which actually masticate their
animal food, depending upon it for nourishment as men do upon cattle
slaughtered in an abattoir. Darwin’s luminous account of these two
species alone, which occupies more than three hundred absorbingly
interesting pages of his “Insectivorous Plants,” should be read by
every one interested in these freaks of nature.
When we go to some sunny cranberry bog to look for these sundews,
nothing could be more innocent looking than the tiny plant, its nodding
raceme of buds, usually with only a solitary little blossom (that opens
only in the sunshine) at the top of the curve, its leaves glistening
with what looks like dew, though the midsummer sun may be high in the
heavens. A little fly or gnat, attracted by the bright jewels, alights
on a leaf only to find that the clear drops, more sticky than honey,
instantly glue his feet, that the pretty reddish hairs about him act
like tentacles, reaching inward, to imprison him within their slowly
closing embrace. Here is one of the horrors of the Inquisition
operating in this land of liberty before our very eyes! Excited by the
struggles of the victim, the sensitive hairs close only the faster,
working on the same principle that a vine’s tendrils do when they come
in contact with a trellis. More of the sticky fluid pours upon the
hapless fly, plastering over his legs and wings and the pores on his
body through which he draws his breath. Slowly, surely, the leaf rolls
inward, making a temporary stomach; the cruel hairs bind, the glue
suffocates and holds him fast. Death alone releases him. And now the
leaf’s orgy begins: moistening the fly with a fresh peptic fluid, which
helps in the assimilation, the plant proceeds to digest its food.
Curiously enough, chemical analysis proves that this sundew secrets a
complex fluid corresponding almost exactly to the gastric juice in the
stomach of animals.
Darwin, who fed these leaves with various articles, found that they
could dissolve matter out of pollen, seeds, grass, etc.; yet without a
human caterer, how could a leaf turn vegetarian? When a bit of any
undesirable substance, such as chalk or wood, was placed on the hairs
and excited them, they might embrace it temporarily; but as soon as the
mistake was discovered, it would be dropped! He also poisoned the plants
by administering acids, and gave them fatal attacks of indigestion by
overfeeding them with bits of raw beef!