Insectivorous Plants
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~170,000 words · 792 passages
Cite this work
- APACharles Darwin. (n.d.). Insectivorous Plants. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-darwin/insectivorous-plants
- MLACharles Darwin. "Insectivorous Plants." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-darwin/insectivorous-plants.
- ChicagoCharles Darwin. Insectivorous Plants. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-darwin/insectivorous-plants.
What it is about
The 1875 book in which Darwin documented, experiment after experiment, that there are plants which capture animals, digest them and use their nitrogen.
Context and history
He did it with household means: drops of saliva, bits of meat, glass, hair, salts, all weighed in minute quantities, to see what the sundew responded to and what it did not. The finding that most surprised his contemporaries is that the plant discriminates: it responds to nitrogenous matter and not to an equivalent inert weight. The book matters for two reasons at once. It is a piece of his general argument — a carnivorous plant is an extreme adaptation and shows how far natural selection reaches — and it is also a model of how an investigation is done: everything is recorded, including the trials that yielded nothing. Darwin published more books on botany than on evolution, and this is among the best of them.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Number of insects captured—Description of the leaves and their appendages or tentacles— Preliminary sketch of the action of the various parts, and of the manner in which insects are captured—Duration of the inflection of the tentacles—Nature of the secretion—Manner in which insects are carried to the centre of the leaf—Evidence that the glands have the power of absorption—Small size of the roots. CHAPTER II. THE MOVEMENTS OF THE TENTACLES FROM THE CONTACT OF SOLID BODIES. Inflection of the exterior tentacles owing to the glands of the disc being excited by repeated touches, or by objects left in contact with them—