Next June I hope that some of you children will find these beautiful flowers and these curious leaves.
Why should a leaf be shaped like a pitcher, do you suppose?
These leaves are not only pitcher-like in shape, but also in their way of holding water; for if you succeed in discovering a settlement of pitcher plants, you will find that nearly every pitcher is partly filled with rain water. Usually this water is far from clear. It appears to hold the remains of drowned insects; and sometimes the odor arising from a collection of these pitcher plants is not exactly pleasant.
Perhaps you wonder how it happens that dead insects are found in every one of these pitchers; and possibly you will be surprised to learn that apparently these curious leaves are built for the express purpose of capturing insects.
It is easy to understand that these odd leaves are not so well fitted as more simple ones to cook the plant’s food in the sun, or to take carbon from the air; but if they are unfitted to provide and prepare ordinary food, possibly they are designed to secure food that is extraordinary.
It seems likely that the pitcher plant is not content to live, like other plants, upon the simple food that is taken in from the earth and from the air. We are led to believe that it wishes something more substantial; that it needs a meat diet; and that to secure this, it teaches its leaves to capture flies and insects in order that it may suck in their juices.
These leaves are veined in a curious and striking fashion. The bright-colored veins may convince the insects of the presence of the sweet nectar in which they delight. At all events, in some way they are tempted to enter the hollow leaf; and, once they have crawled or tumbled down its slippery inner surface, they find it impossible to crawl back again, owing to the stiff hairs, pointing downward, which line the upper part of the pitcher.
Even if they have wings, it is difficult for them to fly upward in so straight a line as would be necessary to effect their escape.
When tired out in their efforts to get out of this cruel trap, they fall into the water at the bottom of the pitcher, and are drowned. Their bodies decay and dissolve; and it is thought that this solution is taken in by the leaf, and turned over to the plant as food.
It is just the old, sad story of the spider and the fly, you see, only now it is the pitcher and the fly.