Man-Eating Plant: Difference between revisions

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== Hoaxes & Legends ==

* One of the earliest man-eating plants is the “man-eating tree of Madagascar”, a fearsome entity that was described in 1881 in the ''South Australian Register'', when the newspaper published an account of a "German explorer Carl Liche" who supposedly had eyewitnessed a [[Human Sacrifice]] ceremony of the “Mkodo” people in inner Madagascar:

{{quote| ''"The slender delicate palpi, with the fury of starved serpents, quivered a moment over her head, then as if instinct with demoniac intelligence fastened upon her in sudden coils round and round her neck and arms; then while her awful screams and yet more awful laughter rose wildly to be instantly strangled down again into a gurgling moan, the tendrils one after another, like great green serpents, with brutal energy and infernal rapidity, rose, retracted themselves, and wrapped her about in fold after fold, ever tightening with cruel swiftness and savage tenacity of anacondas fastening upon their prey."''}}

{{quote|''"The slender delicate palpi, with the fury of starved serpents, quivered a moment over her head, then as if instinct with demoniac intelligence fastened upon her in sudden coils round and round her neck and arms; then while her awful screams and yet more awful laughter rose wildly to be instantly strangled down again into a gurgling moan, the tendrils one after another, like great green serpents, with brutal energy and infernal rapidity, rose, retracted themselves, and wrapped her about in fold after fold, ever tightening with cruel swiftness and savage tenacity of anacondas fastening upon their prey."''}}

::While the “eyewitness account” was suspected to be a hoax early on, the man-eating tree still found its believers; in 1924 former Michigan Governor Chase Osborn repeated the legend in a book ''Madagascar, Land of the Man-eating Tree''. However, it has since been confirmed that neither Carl Liche nor the Mkodo ever existed, and that the story was fabricated from scratch. The hoax seems to have been inspired by the first scientific description of carnivorous plants in [[Charles Darwin]]'s book ''Insectivorous Plants'' in 1875.