The deception is managed in this disgraceful fashion. Inside each petal lies a curious ten or twelve-fingered organ, which is in reality an abortive stamen. No. 12 shows you one such petal removed, with the false honey-glands drawn on a larger scale than in the other illustration. The ten-fingered stamen bears at its tip a number of translucent yellow drops, which look like pure nectar. But they are nothing of the kind; I regret to say, they are solid--solid--a commercial falsehood. They glisten like drops: but they are mere glassy imitations; and they are put there with intent to deceive, in order to attract flies and other insects, which come to quaff the supposed nectar, and so unwittingly fertilize the seeds, while they are muddling about perplexed among the pretended honey-glands, without getting paid one sip for their toil and trouble. This is, of course, a flagrant case of obtaining services under false pretences; it deserves fourteen days' without the option of a fine. As a rule, in similar cases, the flies are rewarded for their kind offices as carriers by the merited wage of a drop of honey. But the Grass of Parnassus, mendacious herb, pretends to be purveying a specially fine quantity and quality of nectar, while in reality it offers only a hard, glassy knob with nothing in it. This pays the plant, of course, because the blossoms do not have to go on producing honey fresh and fresh; a mere inexpensive show does just as well as the real article: "Our customers like it!" but the language of the flies when they discover the fraud is something just awful. [Illustration 12.--A SINGLE PETAL, TO SHOW THE CHARACTER OF THE SHAM HONEY.] Nor is this by any means a solitary example of plant depravity. The whole group of pitcher-plants, for instance, cruelly manure themselves by means of living insects in the most treacherous fashion. These lovely and wicked plants live, without exception, in wet and boggy soil, where they cannot get enough animal matter for manure in the ordinary way by the roots: so they lay themselves out instead to capture and absorb the tissues of insects. For this horrid purpose, they twist their leaves into deep pitchers which catch and hold the rain water, and so form reservoirs to drown their prey. Then they entice insects by bright colours to their traps, and allure them to enter by secreting honey at the top of the pitcher. Hairs point downward inside; these allow the flies to walk on to their fate, bribed as they go by lines of nectar: but if they try to return, ah, then they find their mistake: the hairs prevent them, after the fashion of a lobster-pot. Thus they walk on and on till they reach the water, when they are swamped and clotted in a decaying mass, from which the treacherous plant draws manure at last for its own purposes. The pitchers are thus at once traps to catch animals, and stomachs to digest them.