Dr. Hooker gave a most valuable lecture at Belfast on
those wonderful organisms, the carnivorous plants. There are plants, like the diontea and drosera, which are able to eat and digest flies and little morsels of beef exactly as animals would, and probably, in exactly-the same way. Moreover, he said Dr. Burdon Sanderson had proved that the leaf contracted exactly as Muscle would, or as Mr. Huxley explained, that reflex action in a dionm was pre: cisely the same as in a baby. This class of plants furbishes, in. fact, .a new link between the vegetable and the animal kingdoms, and a new subject for physiological inquiry. We are told that in Borneo the natives assert that one plant .of this kind is large enough, if not to eat, at least to kill and try to eat, a minute species of humming-bird ; but the assertion, which seems to in- volve an impossibility, has not yet been tested by European observers. The legend is probably, like most Asiatic legends of the kind, such as those about the upas tree, an exaggeration of actual phenomena.
Previous page
