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sustenance from their victims; if they gain any benefit from their adhesive vesture, it is other than nutrition. In New Zealand grows a small tree of the four-o'clock family (Nyctaginaceae), the Parapara, with inflorescences so viscid that small birds and even reptiles that have the misfortune to touch them become so firmly stuck that they succumb. The Sleepy Catchfly in the pink family is so named because many insects die on its viscid glands. Other species of Silene, and the Clammy Cuphea that grows in weedy fields in the eastern and central United States, also detain small insects alighting upon them, but none of these plants is carnivorous. Neither is the shrubby Roridula of South Africa, once reputed to digest the creatures that stick to its glandular foliage. Similarly, insects that drown in rainwater that collects in

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the cupped leaf bases of Teasels and the Cup Plant do not nourish these tall herbs, which secrete no enzymes to digest them. These are a few of the many cases in which the structure or behavior of one organism is responsible for the deaths of many others from which it derives no benefit.

A viscid plant that does digest its captures is Drosophyllum lusitanicum, a relative of the sundews. Unlike the many carnivorous plants that prefer humid situations, this shrub, which resembles Byblis, grows on dry hillsides in Portugal, Spain, and Morocco, where its roots penetrate deeply into stony soil. It attains a height of six feet (1.8 m.) and displays large, bright yellow flowers. The long, narrow leaves bear glands of two kinds; stalked glands emerge from the edges and lower side; sessile glands are scattered over both surfaces, much as in Byblis. The former are hardly less complex than those of sundews but are not mobile; they secrete large droplets of clear mucilage that attract and hold many flies and other insects but do not digest them. On the capture of a victim, they send a stimulus to surrounding sessile glands, which thereupon secrete a pepsinlike proteolytic enzyme that can completely digest a fly in twenty-four hours, without the aid of bacteria. These same glands absorb the products of digestion, which compensate for deficiencies in the poor upland soils where Drosophyllum grows. In Portugal and Morocco, the plant is hung up in houses to catch flies.

About one hundred species of sundews of the family Droseraceae are widely distributed over Earth, with a preponderance in South Africa and Australia, where they exhibit the most diverse forms. Typically, a sundew has a perennial rhizome crowned by a rosette of glandular, round or elongate leaves, from the axils of which spring slender stalks that display white, magenta, purplish, or scarlet flowers. On some species the leaves are spoon-shaped; on others they are a foot (30 cm.) long and very slender; on some Southern Hemisphere sundews they are divided and fernlike. The yard-long, wiry stems of Drosera gigantea grow in dense tangles through which they twist and clamber, aided by certain long-petioled leaves, the blades of which become adhesive discs for attachment. Other leaves of this peculiar plant are peltate and deeply cupped. Sundews

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Round-leaved sundew, Drosera rotundifolia,

whole plant and a glandular leaf enlarged

are found mainly in places poor in nitrates and other soluble salts, the smaller species especially amid sphagnum, which during the cooler months grows more rapidly and covers the sundew, killing its leaves, whereas in warmer weather the latter rises above the moss to form a new rosette. The result is a succession of dead leaves clinging to the dead stem, which ends in a living rosette. Sundews draw attention by globules of mucilage that cover the upper faces and margins of their leaves and sparkle like dewdrops in sunshine. Each droplet is borne on and tinted red by a stalked gland of complex structure and diverse functions. It is not, like the hairs of plants and many of their glands, of epidermal origin but arises from deeper tissues. The multicellular stalk is traversed by spirally