ing surrounded by strangely
contrasted foes and friends. Often he can link two plants together only
by going into partnership with a student of the rocks, by turning back
the records of the earth until he comes upon a flower long extinct, a
plant which ages ago found the struggle for life too severe for it. He
ever takes care to observe his flowers accurately and fully, but chiefly
that he may rise from observation to explanation, from bare facts to
their causes, from declaring What, to understanding, Whence and How.

One of the stock resources of novelists, now somewhat out of date, was
the inn-keeper who beamed in welcome of his guest, grasped his hand in
gladness, and loaded a table for him in tempting array, and all with
intent that later in the day (or night) he might the more securely
plunge a dagger into his victim's heart--if, indeed, he had not already
improved an opportunity to offer to that victim's lips a poisoned cup.
This imagined treachery might well have been suggested by the behaviour
of certain alluring plants that so far from repelling thieves, or
discouraging pillagers, open their arms to all comers--with purpose of
the deadliest. Of these betrayers the chief is the round-leaved sun-dew,
which plies its nefarious vocation all the way from Labrador to Florida.
Its favourite site is a peat-bog or a bit of swampy lowland, where in
July and August we can see its pretty little white blossoms beckoning to
wayfaring flies and moths their token of good cheer! Circling the
flower-stalk, in rosette fashion, are a dozen or more round leaves, each
of them wearing scores of glands, very like little pins, a drop of gum
glistening on each and every pin by way of head. This appetizing gum is
no other than a fatal stick-fast, the raying pins closing in its aid the
more certainly to secure a hapless prisoner. Soon his prison-house
becomes a stomach for his absorption. Its duty of digestion done, the
leaf in all seeming guilessness once more expands itself for the
enticement of a dupe. To see how much the sun-dew must depend upon its
meal of insects we have only to pull it up from the ground. A touch
suffices--it has just root enough to drink by; the soil in which it
makes, and perhaps has been obliged to make, its home has nothing else
but drink to give it.

Less accomplished in its task of assassination is the common butterwort
to be found on wet rocks in scattered districts of Canada and the States
adjoining Canada