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"And this," Symes looked squarely in each eager eye in turn, "this, gentlemen, is such an opportunity." The timid voice of a man who had made a hundred thousand from a patent fly-trap broke the awed silence. "It sounds good." "Sounds good! It is good." Mr. Symes clenched his huge fist and emphasized the declaration with a blow upon the table which made the dishes rattle.
Symes curbed his irritation at the piffling objections of the Fly-trap King and responded tolerantly. "We'll organize a bank and loan 'em the money. If they fail to come through at the specified time the land will return to the company and we'll have their improvements, making them a small allowance for same, at our discretion.
By the intentness of their gaze it was evident that all were willing enough to look. Symes lowered his voice to a dramatic whisper and swept the air with his outspread fingers. "A clean million!" The man who made only six thousand a year selling plumbers' supplies, gulped. "But who's goin' to buy it?" It was the timid voice of the Fly-trap King. "Buy it!"
"How many tongues have you stowed in that fly-trap of yours, my child?" inquired a thin, elderly Legionnaire with a long nose and clever, twinkling eyes. No nation but Holland could have produced that face, and it was unnecessary that the speaker should introduce himself as a Dutchman. "Fourteen years have I served France in the Legion. I have been to Madagascar and Tonkin.
If the Venus's Fly-trap stood alone, it would be doubly marvelous first, on account of its carnivorous propensities, and then as constituting a real anomaly in organic Nature, to which nothing leads up. Before acquiescing in such a conclusion, the modern naturalist would scrutinize its relatives. Now, the nearest relatives of our vegetable wonder are the sundews.
The mechanism by the progressive development of which living beings have been able to react more and more effectually to their environment is the central nervous system, which is seen in one of its simplest forms in motor plants, such as the sensitive plant and the Venus fly-trap, and in its highest development only in the sanest, healthiest, happiest, and most useful men.
"Carnivorous plants, perhaps, as the fly-trap and the bog sundew." "And why not the humbler cuscuta, the dodder, the cuttlefish of the vegetable kingdom, which shoots out the antennæ of its stems as fine as thread, attaching itself to other plants by tiny suckers and feeding greedily on their juices?" asked the Abbé Gévresin.
But in such incomplete stages, fertilization would have been impossible, and therefore the plant must have died out. Just the same with the curious fly-trap in Dionoea. Whatever may be its benefit to the plant, till the whole apparatus as it now is, was complete, it would have been of no use.
To be sure, a three-cornered tunnel, the second floor back of a lofty cave, would be the last place to look for such an ambush, unless there was some fly-trap opening to it from above. But there might be! Boys and girls, both, their blood flamed upon the fear, then froze until the silence, the bat-churned cave silence, was hung with icicles above them.
The motor mechanism of the fly-trap is perfectly adapted to its purpose. The motor mechanism of man is adapted to its manifold uses, and as new environmental influences surround him, we must believe that new adaptations of the mechanism will be evolved to meet the new conditions.
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