jaded. It not only could be surfeited, but it suffered from indigestion; and a meal of cheese disagreed with the leaves so seriously as finally to kill them.
Finally, Dr. Burdon-Sanderson has made an important contribution to this investigation, by demonstrating the correspondence between the electrical phenomena which accompany muscular action and those which are associated with the closing of the Dionæa-leaf. He has shown that, not alone in the electrical but in structural changes which ensue, the resemblance is complete between the contraction of muscle and that of the leaf; and, the further the inquiry is pursued, the more striking does the resemblance appear.
Drosera.—Unlike the preceding genus, which is confined to a single district, the sundews are widely distributed. The fact that they are closely related to the Dionæa was little known when the curious habits, which are now attracting so much attention, were first discovered.
Mr. Gardom, a Derbyshire botanist, gives an account of what his friend Mr. Whateley, an eminent London surgeon, made out in 1780: "On inspecting some of the contracted leaves we observed a small insect very closely imprisoned therein, which occasioned some astonishment as to how it happened to get into so confined a situation. Afterward, on Mr. Whateley's centrically pressing with a pin other leaves yet in their natural and unexpanded form, we observed a remarkably sudden and elastic spring of the leaves, so as to become inverted upward, and, as it were, encircling the pin, which evidently showed the method by which the fly came into its embarrassing situation."
This account, which is erroneous in representing the movement of the hairs as much more rapid than it really is, must have been written from memory.
In July of the preceding year (though the account was not published till two years afterward). Roth, in Germany, had remarked, in Drosera rotundifolia and longifolia, that "many leaves were folded together from the point toward the base, and that all the hairs were bent like a bow." Upon opening these leaves, he says: "I found in each a dead insect; hence I imagined that this plant, which has some resemblance to the Dionæa muscipula, might also have a similar moving power. . . . With a pair of pliers I placed an ant upon the middle of the leaf of D. rotundifolia. The ant endeavored to escape, but was held fast by the clammy juice at the points of the hairs, which was drawn out by its feet into fine threads. In some minutes, the short hairs on the disk of the leaf began to bend, and in some hours the end of the leaf was so bent inward as to touch the base. The ant died in fifteen minutes, which was before all the hairs had bent themselves."
These facts, established nearly a century ago, by the testimony
