There are plants of prey just as there are beasts of prey and birds of prey. These are plants which live upon animal food just as we do, setting traps and snares for them with all the cunning shown by one of Richard Jefferies’ phenomenal gamekeepers or poachers. What, by the by, is the exact dividing line which separates the poacher from the keeper? Does the one develop into the other as does the chrysalis into the butterfly? I remember a little old Highland stalker, a veteran of the “hull,” as brown and rugged as a russet apple; we had been watching deer a long way off all the morning—the wind wrong for a stalk—and he confided to me all those secrets of deer life which seemed as familiar to him as if, like the Buddha, he had been himself a stag in some previous stage of existence. “How long have you been a stalker, Hughie?” I asked. “Maybe twenty years,” he answered; but then, looking up, his eyes twinkling with a craft worthy of Autolycus, he added, “but I was a shepherd for many years before that.” There was a whole folio volume of predatory but illicit sport in the words. Some plants, like the various pitchers of Nepenthe and others, remain still and are content to rely upon the beauty of their colours to tempt the game to its doom. Caught in the trap, the victims are held tight by some glue like birdlime, or kept from finding their way out by fingers of sharp teeth like the knives of the Iron Virgin of Nürnberg. Others, innocent, humble little creatures, look “as if they would not hurt a fly.” But let the fly beware, and keep out of their grip—“foxes in stealth, wolves in greediness,” they are armed like the butterwort (_pinguicula_) with glands which become active at the touch, and secure the prisoner, or as the sundew (_drosera_), equipped with tentacles which close in upon him like a horror in one of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. How these creatures feed and how they digest their meat is told in Darwin’s “Insectivorous Plants” and elsewhere. These are facts, not fancies. But what gastronome could take offence if he were accused of being as greedy as sundew!