left from one day to three days and a half within, and the bladders were then cut open; but none of the above substances exhibited the least signs of digestion or dissolution; the angles of the cubes being as sharp as ever.  These observations were made subsequently to those on Drosera, Dionaea, Drosophyllum, and Pinguicula; so that I was familiar with the appearance of these substances when undergoing the early and final stages of digestion.  We may therefore conclude that Utricularia cannot digest the animals which it habitually captures.

In most of the bladders the captured animals are so much decayed that they form a pale brown, pulpy mass, with their chitinous coats so tender that they fall to pieces with the greatest ease.  The black pigment of the eye-spots is preserved better than anything else.  Limbs, jaws, &c. are often found quite detached; and this I suppose is the result of the vain struggles of the later captured animals.  I have sometimes felt surprised at the small proportion of imprisoned animals in a fresh state compared with those utterly decayed.  Mrs. Treat states with respect [page 411] to the larvae above referred to, that “usually in less “than two days after a large one was captured the fluid “contents of the bladders began to assume a cloudy “or muddy appearance, and often became so dense “that the outline of the animal was lost to view.”  This statement raises the suspicion that the bladders secrete some ferment hastening the process of decay.  There is no inherent improbability in this supposition, considering that meat soaked for ten minutes in water mingled with the milky juice of the papaw becomes quite tender and soon passes, as Browne remarks in his ‘Natural History of Jamaica,’ into a state of putridity.

Whether or not the decay of the imprisoned animals is an any way hastened, it is certain that matter is absorbed from them by the quadrifid and bifid processes.  The extremely delicate nature of the membrane of which these processes are formed, and the large surface which they expose, owing to their number crowded over the whole interior of the bladder, are circumstances all favouring the process of absorption.  Many perfectly clean bladders which had never caught any prey were opened, and nothing could be distinguished with a No. 8 object-glass of Hartnack within the delicate, structureless protoplasmic lining of the arms, excepting in each a single yellowish particle or modified nucleus.  Sometimes two or even three such particles were present; but in this case traces of decaying matter could generally be detected.  On the other hand, in bladders containing either one large or several small decayed animals, the processes presented a widely different appearance.  Six such bladders were carefully examined; one contained an elongated, coiled-up larva; another a single large entomostracan crustacean, and the others from two to five smaller ones, all [page 412] in a decayed state.  In these six bladders, a large number of the quadrifid