A FLY-CATCHING PLANT.
WILLIAM KERR HIGLEY,
Secretary of The Chicago Academy of Sciences.
Queen of the Marsh, imperial Drosera treads
Rush-fringed banks, and moss-embroidered beds.
—Erasmus Darwin, in The Botanic Garden, 1789.
SOME of the most interesting forms of nature are not the most showy and are not easily observed by the untrained eye. Many of their characteristics can only be known by carefully conducted investigations, both in the field and in the laboratory.
The advance of science has shown us that it is as natural for some plants to obtain much of their nourishment from the animal world, by a true process of feeding, as it is for animal forms to obtain their sustenance, either directly or indirectly, from the vegetable world.
There are many species among the lower orders of plants that are well known animal parasites, but there are also, among our more highly organized flowering species, forms that improvise a stomach and secrete an acid fluid for the digestion of nitrogenous food which is afterwards absorbed and used in tissue building. These are in no sense of the term parasites.