I can do better still with the flower of the dragon arum (Arum dracunculus), so remarkable for its shape and for its unequalled stench. Imagine a wide, lanceolate blade, of a clarety purple, half a yard long and rolled below into an ovoid pouch the size of a hen’s egg. Through the opening of this wallet rises a central column springing from the bottom, a long, bright-green club, encircled at its base by two bracelets, one of ovaries, the other of stamens. Such, briefly described, is the flower, or rather the inflorescence, of the dragon arum. For two days it exhales a frightful stench of carrion, worse than the proximity of a dead Dog would yield. During the hottest part of the day, with a wind blowing, it is loathsome, unbearable. Let us brave the infected atmosphere and go up to it; we shall behold a curious sight. Informed by the foul odour, which spreads far and wide, various insects come flying along, such insects as make sausage-meat of small corpses—Toads, Adders, Lizards, Hedgehogs, Moles, Field-mice—which the husbandman hits with his spade and flings away disembowelled on the foot-path. They swoop down upon the great leaf, which, with its livid purple, looks like a strip of meat gone bad; they caper about, intoxicated by the smell of corpse which they love; they roll down the slope and are swallowed up in the purse. After a few hours of bright sunshine, the receptacle is full. Let us look inside, through the narrow opening. No elsewhere could you see such a crowd. It is a mad whirl of backs and bellies, of wing-cases and legs, swarming, rolling over and over, amid the snap of interlocked joints, rising and falling, floating and sinking, seething and bubbling without end. It is a drunken revel, an epidemic of delirium tremens. Some, few as yet, emerging from the mass, climb to the opening by means of the central pole or the walls of the enclosure. Will they take wing and make their escape? Not they! Standing on the brink of the chasm, almost free, they drop back into the whirlpool, in a fresh bout of intoxication. The bait is irresistible. Not one of them will quit the assembly until the evening, or perhaps next morning, when the heady fumes have evaporated. Then the mass becomes disentangled; and the insects extricate themselves from one another’s embraces and slowly, as it were regretfully, leave the place and fly away. At the bottom of this devil’s purse remains a heap of dead and dying, of severed limbs and disjointed wing-cases, the inevitable result of the frenzied orgy. Soon, Wood-lice, Earwigs and Ants will arrive and devour the deceased.