Sometimes in the summer one may notice a little red club about two to three inches long sticking out of short grass. If one carefully pulls this up it is found to be growing out of a dead chrysalis or grub. It is a fungus whose spores have attacked the caterpillar; they have developed inside its body, and eventually, having completely eaten up the insect, form the red club, which is producing hundreds of thousands of spores intended to attack other caterpillars.
The branches like stag's horns are the fruit of a fungus, Cordyceps Taylori, which lived inside and killed the caterpillar.
An allied fungus forms a peculiar branched fruit rather like a minute stag's horn, and the caterpillar may be seen for some time crawling about with this extraordinary fungus sticking out of its head. Of course the bacteria are, some of them, by far the most dangerous foes of animals (see page [328]).
Then there is a small Liverwort, a little red, moss-like plant (Frullania tamarisci), which may be found growing on the bark of trees, which is said to catch animalcula in the small sack-like leaves which are underneath the ordinary ones.
But it is amongst the higher flowering plants that one discovers the most extraordinary and purposeful arrangements for capturing and digesting insects and other creatures.
In the case of many of these insectivorous plants, traps or pitfalls are prepared for the insect to fall into.
There are many plants in which the rain is intended to run in one particular direction, and it is not at all uncommon to find hollows at the base of the leaf where dust, dirt, and dead insects accumulate. One very curious plant of this sort is Dischidia Rafflesiana, in which the leaves have become quite like a pitcher, and have been compared to "natural flower-pots" intended to hold rain and leaf-mould.[147]
Then there is the Bromelia or Pineapple family, which consists for the most part of plants which live on the branches of trees. In very many of these a small cup is formed in the middle of the rosette or tuft of leaves, and water collects in this central cup.