9HMKJM - The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

INSECTIVOROUS PLANTS. 201
those who were not sagacious enough to bring out
their full meaning or importance. Vegetable mor-
phology, dimly apprehended by Linnaeus, initiated by
Caspar Frederick Wolff, and again, independently
in successive generations, by Goethe and by De Can-
dolle, offers a parallel instance. The botanists of
Goethe's day could not see any sense, advantage, or
practical application, to be made of the proposition
that the parts of a blossom answer to leaves ; and so
the study of homologies had long to wait. Until
lately it appeared to be of no consequence whatever
(except, perhaps, to the insects) whether Drosera and
Sarracenia caught flies or not ; and even Dionaea ex-
cited only unreflecting wonder as a vegetable anomaly.
As if there were real anomalies in Nature, and some
one plant possessed extraordinary powers denied to
all others, and (as was supposed) of no importance to
itself !
That most expert of fly-catchers, Dionaea, of which
so much has been written and so little known until
lately, came very near revealing its secret to Solander
and Ellis a hundred years ago, and doubtless to John
Bartram, our botanical pioneer, its probable discoverer,
who sent it to Europe. Ellis, in his published letter
to Linnaeus, with which the history begins, described
the structure and action of the living trap correctly ;
noticed that the irritability which called forth the
quick movement closing the trap, entirely resided in
the few small bristles of its upper face ; that this
whole surface was studded with glands, which proba-
bly secreted a liquid ; and that the trap did not open
again when an insect was captured, even upon the