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Round-Leaved Sundew

Drosera rotundifolia. Sundew Family.

Scape.--A few inches high. Leaves.--Rounded, abruptly narrowed into spreading, hairy leaf-stalks; beset with reddish, gland-bearing bristles. Flowers.--White; growing in a one-sided raceme, which so nods at its apex that the fresh-blown blossom is always uppermost. Calyx.--Of five sepals. Corolla.--Of the petals. Pistil.--One, with three or five styles, which are sometimes so deeply two-parted as to be taken for twice as many. "What's this I hear About the new carnivora? Can little plants Eat bugs and ants And gnats and flies? A sort of retrograding: Surely the fare Of flowers is air, Or sunshine sweet; They shouldn't eat, Or do aught so degrading!" But by degrees we are learning to reconcile ourselves to the fact that the more we study the plants the less we are able to attribute to them altogether unfamiliar and ethereal habits. We find that the laws which control their being are strangely suggestive of those which regulate ours, and after the disappearance of the shock which attends the shattered illusion, their charm is only increased by the new sense of kinship.

The round-leaved sundew is found blossoming in many of our marshes in midsummer. When the sun shines upon its leaves they look as though covered with sparkling dewdrops, hence its common name. These drops are a glutinous exudation, by means of which insects visiting the plant are first captured; the reddish bristles then close tightly about them, and it is supposed that their juices are absorbed by the plant. At all events the rash visitor rarely escapes. In many localities it is easy to secure any number to these little plants and to try for one's self the rather grewsome experiment of feeding them with small insects. Should the tender-hearted recoil from such reckless slaughter, they might confine their offerings on the altar of science of mosquitoes, small spiders, other deservedly un-popular creatures. D. Americana is a very similar species, with longer, narrower leaves. The thread-leaved sundew, D. filiformis, has fine, thread-like leaves and pink flowers, and is found in wet sand along the coast. "A little marsh-plant, yellow green, And pricked at lip with tender red. Thread close, and either way you tread Some faint black water jets between Lest you should bruise the curious head.

You call it sundew : how it grows, If with its color it have breath, If life taste sweet to it, if death Pain its soft petal, no man knows: Man has no sight or sense that saith." -SWINBURNE.