The former, Sarracenia (or Side-saddle plant), is a common and rather widespread North American plant, which is especially abundant in Florida. It is cultivated in most botanical gardens, but can only be grown in greenhouses. The leaves are about six inches to a foot long, and are hollow, funnel-shaped tubes with a short, flat wing along one edge. They may be an inch or two in diameter at the top or wider end, where there is also a sort of half-open lid which keeps rain from getting into the inside of the leaf. The colour of these tube-like or vase-like leaves varies. It is often variegated with brown, red, and yellow, and is conspicuous enough even at a distance. Thus insects fly to these vases and alight on the little cap or lid, where they find honey and enjoy themselves. Other insects crawl up along the rim or wing of the vase, finding honey here and there along their road. Having got to the lid, the insect, being of an inquiring or inquisitive disposition, will look inside the tube and endeavour to find more honey therein. It reaches the rim of the vase and finds that there is honey inside; it can easily crawl down, and fails to notice that the inside of the vase is lined with long stiff points which all point downwards. These points or hairs do not at all interfere with its passage down, and it proceeds to the honey which forms a smooth, slippery coating. Then, after greedily absorbing the honey, it tries to get out again. But that is quite a different matter. Each one of these points or hairs is facing it, and the whole inside is smooth and slippery. It struggles, slips, and falls into a pool of water which fills the lower part of the vase. That is what the plant has developed these pitchers for. The body of the insect after a time decays away, and only its empty shell remains. An extraordinary number of insects are caught by these Sarracenia vases. Sometimes in one which is only ten inches long, three or four inches will be full of the corpses of blackbeetles and other drowned insects, and it is said that birds occasionally visit these vases in order to pick them out. There is probably some sort of secretion in the water. "A centipede 1-2/3 inches long having fallen into a vase of _Sarracenia purpurea_ in the night was found only half-immersed in the water. The upper half of the creature projected above the liquid, and made violent attempts to escape; but the lower part had not only become motionless, but had turned white from the effect of the surrounding liquid; it appeared to be macerated, and exhibited alterations which are not produced in so short a time in centipedes immersed in ordinary rainwater."[147] [147] Kerner, _Natural History of Plants_. Many details are taken from this work in the present chapter.