There are a great many more of these highly developed insect-eaters, such as the Guiana heliamphora (more classical shapes), the Australian cephalotus, and the American side-saddle flowers, and they all without exception grow in very wet and boggy places, like the English sundews, butterworts, and bladderworts. The reason so many marsh plants have taken to these strange insect-eating habits is simply that their roots are often badly supplied with manure or ammonia in any form; and, as no plant can get on without these necessaries of life (in the strictest sense), only those marshy weeds have any chance of surviving which can make up in one way or another for the native deficiencies of their situation. The sundews show us, as it were, the first stage in the acquisition of these murderous habits; the pitcher-plants are the abandoned ruffians which have survived among all their competitors in virtue of their exceptional ruthlessness and deceptive coloration. I ought to add that in all cases the pitchers are not flowers, but highly modified and altered leaves, though in many instances they are quite as beautifully colored as the largest and handsomest exotic orchids. The principle of Venus’s Fly-trap is somewhat different, though its practice is equally nefarious. This curious marsh-plant, instead of setting hocussed bowls of liquid for its victims, like a Florentine of the Fourteenth Century, lays a regular gin or snare for them on the same plan as a common snapping rat-trap. The end of the leaf is divided into two folding halves by the midrib, and on each half are three or five highly sensitive hairs. The moment one of these hairs is touched by a fly, the two halves come together, inclosing the luckless insect between them. As if on purpose to complete the resemblance to a rat-trap, too, the edges of the leaf are formed of prickly jagged teeth, which fit in between one another when the gin shuts, and so effectually cut off the insect’s retreat. The plant then sucks up the juices of the fly; and as soon as it has fully digested them, the leaf opens automatically once more, and resets the trap for another victim. It is an interesting fact that this remarkable insectivore appears to be still a new and struggling species, or else an old type on the very point of extinction, for it is only found in a few bogs over a very small area in the neighborhood of Wilmington, South California. ATHENA IN THE EARTH --JOHN RUSKIN The spirit in the plant--that is to say, its power of gathering dead matter out of the wreck round it, and shaping it into its own chosen shape--is, of course, strongest at the moment of its flowering, for it then not only gathers, but forms, with the greatest energy.