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Updated: May 4, 2025
Having quitted San Fernando on the 27th of May, we arrived, by help of the rapid current of the Orinoco, in seven hours, at the mouth of the Rio Mataveni. Here, as on the banks of the Atabapo, we were struck by the sight of a small species of drosera, having exactly the appearance of the drosera of Europe.
The contrivance in Utricularia and Dionæa, and in fact in Drosera too, seems fully as great and complex as in Orchids, but there is not the same motive force.
As to the Drosera, the Dionaea, and insectivorous plants in general, they are fed by their roots, like other plants; they too fix, by their green parts, the carbon of the carbonic acid in the atmosphere. Their faculty of capturing, absorbing and digesting insects must have arisen late, in quite exceptional cases where the soil was too poor to furnish sufficient nourishment.
Here we have the faculty of movement to a definite end, upon external irritation, of the same nature with that displayed by Dionaea and Drosera, although slower for the most part than even in the latter. But the movement of the hour-hand of the clock is not different in nature or cause from that of the second-hand.
From this time forward I occasionally attended to the subject, both with respect to man and our domesticated animals. My book sold largely; 5267 copies having been disposed of on the day of publication. In the summer of 1860 I was idling and resting near Hartfield, where two species of Drosera abound; and I noticed that numerous insects had been entrapped by the leaves.
Roth, a keen German botanist of the eighteenth century, was the first to detect, or at least to record, some evidence of intention in Drosera, and to compare its action with that of Dionaea, which, through Ellis's account, had shortly before been made known in Europe. For Roth surmised that both these plants were, in their way, predaceous.
A small fly is held so fast, and in its struggles comes in contact with so many of these glutinous globules, that it seldom escapes. The result is much the same to the insect, whether captured in the trap of Dionaea or stuck fast to the limed bristles of Drosera.
These, as we have heard, may before long be reprinted in a volume, and supplemented by some long-pending but still unfinished investigations upon the action of Dionaea and Drosera a capital subject for Mr. Darwin's handling.
Linaria italica is a hybrid toad-flax between L. genistifolia and L. vulgaris, a cross which I have repeated in my garden. Drosera obovata is a hybrid sundew between D. anglica and D. rotundifolia. Primula variabilis is a hybrid between the two common primroses, P. officinalis and P. grandiflora.
We do not hesitate to class amongst vegetables the Drosera, the Dionaea, the Pinguicula, which are insectivorous plants. On the other hand, the fungi, which occupy so considerable a place in the vegetable world, feed like animals: whether they are ferments, saprophytes or parasites, it is to already formed organic substances that they owe their nourishment.
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