The leaf of the sundew is round and flat, and it is covered by a number of small red glands, which act as the attractive advertisement to the misguided midges. Their knobby ends are covered with a glutinous secretion, which glistens like honey in the sunlight, and so gains for the plant its common English name. But the moment a hapless fly, attracted by hopes of meat or nectar, settles quietly in its midst, on hospitable thoughts intent, the viscid liquid holds him tight immediately, and clogs his legs and wings, so that he is snared exactly as a peregrine is snared with bird-lime. Then the leaf, with all its “red-lipped mouths,” closes over him slowly but surely, and crushes him by folding its edges inward gradually toward the centre. The fly often lingers long with ineffectual struggles, while the cruel crawling leaf pours forth a digestive fluid--a vegetable gastric juice, as it were--and dissolves him alive piecemeal in its hundred clutching suckers. Our little English insectivorous plants, however (we have at least five or six such species in our own islands), are mere clumsy bunglers compared to the great and highly developed insect-eaters of the tropics, which stand to them in somewhat the same relation as the Bengal tiger stands to the British wildcat or the skulking weasel. The Indian pitcher-plants or Nepenthes bear big pitchers of very classical shapes, closed in the early state with a lid, which lifts itself and opens the pitcher as soon as the plant has fully completed its insecticidal arrangements. The details of the trap vary somewhat in the different species, but as a whole the _modus operandi_ of the plant is somewhat after this atrocious fashion. The pitcher contains a quantity of liquid, that of the sort appropriately known as the Rajah holding as much as a quart; and the insect, attracted in most cases by some bright color, crawls down the sticky side, quaffs the unkind Nepenthe, and forgets his troubles forthwith in the vat of oblivion prepared for him beneath by the delusive vase. A slimy Lethe flows over his dissolving corse, and the relentless pitcher-plant sucks his juices to supply his own fibres with the necessary nitrogenous materials. The California pitcher-plant, or Darlingtonia, is a member of a totally distinct family, which has independently hit upon the same device in the Western world as the Indian Nepenthes in the Eastern Hemisphere. The pitcher in this case, though differently produced, is hooded and lidded like its Oriental analogue; but the inside of the hood is furnished with short hairs, all pointing inward, and legibly inscribed (to the botanical eye) with the appropriate motto: “Vestigia nulla retrorsum.” The whole arrangement is colored dingy orange, so as to attract the attention of flies; and it contains a viscid digestive fluid in which the flies are first drowned and then slowly melted and assimilated. The pitchers are often found half full of dead and decaying assorted insects.