Crossword-Solution: DIONAEA 7 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 8

You will laugh; but it is, at present, my full belief (after endless experiments) that they detect (and move in consequence of) the 1/2880 part of a single grain of nitrate of ammonia; but the muriate and sulphate of ammonia bother their chemical skill, and they cannot make anything of the nitrogen in these salts! I began this work on Drosera in relation to GRADATION as throwing light on Dionaea." Later in the autumn he was again obliged to leave home for Eastbourne, where he continued his work on Drosera.

These varied stimulants are conveyed down the pedicel by some means; it cannot be vibration, for drops of fluid put on quite quietly cause the movement; it cannot be absorption of the fluid from cell to cell, for I can see the rate of absorption, which though quick, is far slower, and in Dionaea the transmission is instantaneous; analogy from animals would point to transmission through nervous matter.

Until lately it appeared to be of no consequence whatever (except, perhaps, to the insects) whether Drosera and Sarracenia caught flies or not; and even Dionaea excited only unreflecting wonder as a vegetable anomaly.

Curtis (by whose death, two years ago, we lost one of our best botanists, and the master in his especial line, mycology), forty years and more ago resided at Wilmington, North Carolina, in the midst of the only district to which the Dionaea is native; and he published, in 1834, in the first volume of the "Journal of the Boston Society of Natural History," by far the best account of this singular plant which had then appeared.

Darwin, with the same results, and with a small but highly-curious additional one--namely, that the fluid secreted in the trap of Dionaea, like the gastric juice, has an acid reaction.