Venus' Fly-Trap

a most peculiar plant allied to the sundew. The plant grows only in the sandy coast plains of South Carolina. The flower stem rises from the center of a rosette of root leaves which are the peculiar part of the plant. Each leaf is narrowed to a neck near its end, the portion beyond which is widened into a sensitive, book-shaped extremity, an inch in width, surrounded by a fringe of sticky bristles and covered with a mucilage of the plant's own manufacture. When an insect lights on this surface, the leaf is irritated and the end closes up, book-fashion, like a trap and imprisons the insect. The presumption is that the plant feeds on the insect.