One of our most beautiful moorland plants is that which bears the attractive name, “grass of Parnassus.” This also is not a grass, and does not in the least resemble one. It is well worth looking for and looking at when found. From a group of dark-green, glossy, heart-shaped leaves rises a slender stem four or five inches high, with one leaf growing on it midway up its height. This stem bears a single cup-shaped flower as large as a common buttercup, with five white petals marked with darker veins. The central parts of the flower are yellowish-green. Round the stigma stand the five stamens, and between these and opposite the petals are five curiously shaped nectaries or honey vessels. They are fringed with a row of white hairs, each ending in a yellow knob, and look like a tiny golden crown placed in the centre of the flower-cup. The name of the flower is said to be taken from Mount Parnassus in Greece, the home of the Muses. Certainly the flower itself is dainty enough to be a favourite with the poets. [Illustration: _Butterwort._] Some plants have developed the curious habit of eating, or, at any rate, digesting and absorbing the juices of insects. Two of those insectivorous plants may be found in our peat-moss. In certain places we may notice that the thick carpet of moss is dotted with little rosettes of bright yellowish green, which look like vegetable star-fishes scattered over a beach of moss. That is one of our “plants of prey.” It is called the butterwort. From the centre of the rosette rises a slender stalk of two or three inches, bearing a small dusky purple flower somewhat like a dog-violet. The green leaves which form the rosette are stiff, and lie close to the ground, as if to keep a clear space among the other plants. They curl up at the edges, and look as if they did not want to mingle with their kindred round about; and indeed they do not, for they have other game in view. Attracted by this bright green star, a small insect comes in search, perhaps, of honey. He finds the leaf covered with a sticky fluid, and his touch causes more of the fluid to come out of little pores in the leaf. The insect is held fast, and the gum clogs up the pores of his body so that he cannot breathe. He soon dies. Then the plant pours out an acid liquid, which dissolves all the soft parts of the captured insect, and leaves only the skeleton. At the same time this dissolved or digested food is sucked in by the pores of the leaf. The acid juice of the butterwort is so like the juice of the animal stomach, that in Lapland the people used to pour warm milk over butterwort leaves, and thus changed it into a curd, just as we do by adding to the milk some rennet, made from the stomach of a calf. [Illustration: _Sundew._]