Parrots are known to be susceptible to a disease peculiar to themselves, and a number of fatal cases in human beings of what was at first supposed to be malignant influenza, pneumonia was traced to the bacillus which is thought to be the cause of the parrot disease. Cats are sometimes known to have tuberculosis, and that they have in many cases been carriers of diphtheria and other ordinary infections is more than suspected. There is not at present any great need for a crusade on sanitary grounds against the keeping of pet animals, but they are multiplying more and more, and it does not seem unreasonable that greater care in the matter of determining the first signs of disease should be demanded of their owners, and then so guarding them as to prevent their being a source of contagion to human beings. Attention should be paid to this warning as regards children, as animals play more freely with them and the children are more apt to be infected. 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. Such a plant is our common round-leaved sundew (_Drosera rotundifolia_, L.). The generic name Drosera is from the Greek, meaning dew. This rather insignificant, but pretty little plant is distributed nearly throughout the world, and is usually found in bogs, or in wet sand near some body of water. The flower stalk is seldom more than six or eight inches in height and bears very small white or pinkish-white flowers.