It is impossible not to be impressed with the extraordinary variety of all these contrivances by which plants are able to escape the trouble of supporting themselves. But such ways of life involve certain disadvantages. Supposing there is nothing on which to climb, the stems trail feebly on the ground, and are probably soon choked by the surrounding grasses. Curiously enough, there are varieties of the Ivy, Wistaria, and the French Bean which are upright, and do not climb at all. The Tree Ivy has all its leaves like the leaves of the flowering shoot in the common form. In America, _Wistaria sinensis_ is often grown as a standard tree, and does not send out the long shoots, sometimes thirty feet in length, which are common when it grows on walls. The dwarf French Bean has a thick stem and requires no support, yet it often puts out a long slender shoot which tries to twine round something. In a tropical forest also, the creepers, though they damage the trees, yet manage to find space for their leaves and flowers: more vegetable matter is formed per square yard of ground than would be the case if there were no climbing plants. CHAPTER XXVI PLANTS WHICH PREY ON PLANTS The kinds of cannibals--Bacteria--Spring flowers--Pale, ghostly Wood-flowers--Their alliance with fungi--Gooseberries growing on trees--Orchid-hunting--The life of an orchid--The mistletoe--Balder the Beautiful--Druids--Mistletoe as a remedy--Its parasitic roots--The trees it prefers--The _Cactus Loranthus_--Yellow Rattle and Eyebright, or Milk-thief, and their root-suckers--Broomrape and toothwort--Their colour and tastes--The scales of the toothwort which catch animalcula--Sir Stamford Raffles--A flower a yard across--The Dodder--Its twining stem and sucker-roots--Parasites rare, degenerate and dangerously situated. The word _cannibal_ is often used in a very loose and unscientific way. Amongst some savage tribes it is the custom to eat old people and young children; but this is only in seasons of famine and scarcity, when there is no other food available, and not because they are specially fond of them. But amongst other tribes wars are made for the special purpose of capturing fat young people to cook. Sometimes they have become so accustomed to such delicacies that they are unable to get their food in any other way. Of course, when tribes become "pure cannibals" of this last type they have to be destroyed like wild beasts.