To trace a gradation between a simply absorbing hair with a glutinous tip, through which the plant may perchance derive slight contingent advantage, and the tentacles of a sundew, with their exquisite and associated adaptations, does not much lessen the wonder nor explain the phenomena. After all, as Mr. Darwin modestly concludes, "we see how little has been made out in comparison with what remains unexplained and unknown." But all this must be allowed to be an important contribution to the doctrine of the gradual acquirement of uses and functions, and hardly to find conceivable explanation upon any other hypothesis.
There remains one more mode in which plants of the higher grade are known to prey upon animals; namely, by means of pitchers, urns, or tubes, in which insects and the like are drowned or confined, and either macerated or digested. To this Mr. Darwin barely alludes on the last page of the present volume. The main facts known respecting the American pitcher-plants have, as was natural, been ascertained in this country; and we gave an abstract, two years ago, of our then incipient knowledge. Much has been learned since, although all the observations have been of a desultory character. If space permitted, an instructive narrative might be drawn up, as well of the economy of the Sarracenias as of how we came to know what we do of it. But the very little we have room for will be strictly supplementary to our former article.
The pitchers of our familiar Northern Sarracenia, which is likewise Southern, are open-mouthed; and, although they certainly secrete some liquid when young, must derive most of the water they ordinarily contain from rain. How insects are attracted is unknown, but the water abounds with their drowned bodies and decomposing remains.
In the more southern S. flava, the long and trumpet-shaped pitchers evidently depend upon the liquid which they themselves secrete, although at maturity, when the hood becomes erect, rain may somewhat add to it. This species, as we know, allures insects by a peculiar sweet exudation within the orifice; they fall in and perish, though seldom by drowning, yet few are able to escape; and their decomposing remains accumulate in the narrow bottom of the vessel. Two other long-tubed species of the Southern States are similar in these respects. There is another, S. psittacina, the parrot-headed species, remarkable for the cowl-shaped hood so completely inflexed over the mouth of the small pitcher that no rain can possibly enter. Little is known, however, of the efficiency of this species as a fly-catcher; but its conformation has a morphological interest, leading up, as it does, to the Californian type of pitcher presently to be mentioned.
But the remaining species, S. variolaris, is the most wonderful of our pitcher-plants in its adaptations for the capture of insects. The inflated and mottled lid or hood overarches the ample orifice of the tubular pitcher sufficiently to ward off the rain, but not to obstruct the free access of flying insects. Flies, ants, and most insects, glide and fall from the treacherous smooth throat into the deep well below, and never escape. They are allured by a sweet secretion just within the orifice— which was discovered and described long ago, and the knowledge of it wellnigh forgotten until recently. And, finally, Dr. Mellichamp, of South Carolina, two years ago made the capital discovery that, during the height of the season, this lure extends from the orifice down nearly to the ground, a length of a foot or two, in the form of a honeyed line or narrow trail on the edge of the wing-like border which is conspicuous in all these species, although only in this one, so far as known, turned to such account. Here, one would say, is a special adaptation to ants and such terrestrial and creeping insects. Well, long before this sweet trail was known, it was remarked by the late Prof. Wyman and others that the pitchers of this species, in the savannahs of Georgia and Florida, contain far more ants than they do of all other insects put together.
Finally, all this is essentially repeated in the peculiar Californian pitcher-plant (Darlingtonia), a genus of the same natural family, which captures insects in great variety, enticing them by a sweetish secretion over the whole inside of the inflated hood and that of a curious forked appendage, resembling a fish-tail, which overhangs the orifice. This orifice is so concealed that it can be seen and approached only from below, as if—the casual observer might infer—to escape visitation. But dead insects of all kinds, and their decomposing remains, crowd the cavity and saturate the liquid therein contained, enticed, it is said, by a peculiar odor, as well as by the sweet lure which is at some stages so abundant as to drip from the tips of the overhanging appendage. The principal observations upon this pitcher-plant in its native habitat have been made by Mrs. Austin, and only some of the earlier ones have thus far been published by Mr. Canby. But we are assured that in this, as in the Sarracenia variolaris, the sweet exudation extends at the proper season from the orifice down the wing nearly to the ground, and that ants follow this honeyed pathway to their destruction. Also, that the watery liquid in the pitcher, which must be wholly a secretion, is much increased in quantity after the capture of insects.
It cannot now well be doubted that the animal matter is utilized by the plant in all these cases, although most probably only after maceration or decomposition. In some of them even digestion, or at least the absorption of undecomposed soluble animal juices, may be suspected; but there is no proof of it. But, if pitchers of the Sarracenia family are only macerating vessels, those of Nepenthes—the pitchers of the Indian Archipelago, familiar in conservatories—seem to be stomachs. The investigations of the President of the Royal Society, Dr. Hooker, although incomplete, wellnigh demonstrate that these not only allure insects by a sweet secretion at the rim and upon the lid of the cup, but also that their capture, or the presence of other partly soluble animal matter, produces an increase and an acidulation of the contained watery liquid, which thereupon becomes capable of acting in the manner of that of Drosera and Dionaea, dissolving flesh, albumen, and the like.
After all, there never was just ground for denying to vegetables the use of animal food. The fungi are by far the most numerous family of plants, and they all live upon organic matter, some upon dead and decomposing, some upon living, some upon both; and the number of those that feed upon living animals is large. Whether these carnivorous propensities of higher plants which so excite our wonder be regarded as survivals of ancestral habits, or as comparatively late acquirements, or even as special endowments, in any case what we have now learned of them goes to strengthen the conclusion that the whole organic world is akin.
The volume upon "The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants" is a revised and enlarged edition of a memoir communicated to the Linnaean Society in 1865, and published in the ninth volume of its Journal. There was an extra impression, but, beyond the circle of naturalists, it can hardly have been much known at first-hand. Even now, when it is made a part of the general Darwinian literature, it is unlikely to be as widely read as the companion volume which we have been reviewing; although it is really a more readable book, and well worthy of far more extended notice at our hands than it can now receive. The reason is obvious. It seems as natural that plants should climb as it does unnatural that any should take animal food. Most people, knowing that some plants "twine with the sun," and others "against the sun," have an idea that the sun in some way causes the twining; indeed, the notion is still fixed in the popular mind that the same species twines in opposite directions north and south of the equator.
Readers of this fascinating treatise will learn, first of all, that the sun has no influence over such movements directly, and that its indirect influence is commonly adverse or disturbing, except the heat, which quickens vegetable as it does animal life. Also, that climbing is accomplished by powers and actions as unlike those generally predicated of the vegetable kingdom as any which have been brought to view in the preceding volume. Climbing plants "feel" as well as "grow and live;" and they also manifest an automatism which is perhaps more wonderful than a response by visible movement to an external irritation. Nor do plants grow up their supports, as is unthinkingly supposed; for, although only growing or newly-grown parts act in climbing, the climbing and the growth are entirely distinct. To this there is one exception—an instructive one, as showing how one action passes into another, and how the same result may be brought about in different ways—that of stems which climb by rootlets, such as of ivy and trumpet-creeper. Here the stem ascends by growth alone, taking upward direction, and is fixed by root-lets as it grows. There is no better way of climbing walls, precipices, and large tree-trunks.