Closely related to the sundew is the Venus fly-trap (Dionæa muscipula, Ellis). This is a native in the eastern part of North Carolina only.
The leaf of this plant is provided with two lobes, which close quickly when the sensitive hairs, which are situated on the upper surface of the leaf, are irritated by an insect. The acid secretion flows out and the leaves remain closed till digestion and absorption are completed.
Dr. Asa Gray has referred to this species as "that most expert of fly-catchers."
TREES AND ELOQUENCE.
W. E. WATT.
FORTY years in the pulpit of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Henry Ward Beecher stood and poured forth a stream of eloquence which shook the world. During the stress of civil war he stemmed the current of English sentiment with his peculiar powers and brought about a change of feeling which was the salvation of our Union. This greatest of our pulpit orators was a lover of trees, and some of his finer passages were inspired by them.
Without doubt, better trees there might be than even the most noble and beautiful now. I suppose God has, in his thoughts, much better ones than he has ever planted on this globe. They are reserved for the glorious land. Beneath them may we walk!
To most people a grove is a grove, and all groves are alike. But no two groves are alike. There is as marked a difference between different forests as between different communities. A grove of pines without underbrush, carpeted with the fine-fingered russet leaves of the pine, and odorous of resinous gums, has scarcely a trace of likeness to a maple woods, either in the insects, the birds, the shrubs, the light and shade, or the sound of its leaves. If we lived in olden times, among young mythologies, we should say that pines held the imprisoned spirit of naiads and water-nymphs, and that their sounds were of the water for whose lucid depths they always sighed. At any rate, the first pines must have grown on the seashore, and learned their first accents from the surf and the waves; and all their posterity have inherited the sound, and borne it inland to the mountains.