this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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Damn it... Now I am wondering what a pitcher plant would do to a penis.
It would be like sticking your penis in pineapple juice. It contains digestive enzymes that are very similar to stomach acid. The reason that butterwort (another carnivorous plant) is called by that name is that you can use the plant's dew to curdle milk. Just like how you can use acid or enzymes to cure food, it would cure your penis (in fact, volume I of the book "Science For All" from the 1870s has an entire chapter on carnivorous plants, and they give a fascinating description of how you can cure meat using sundew or butterwort dew) The curing (effectively cooking) would not occur very quickly (it's not like it's piranha solution), but it would happen, and that tingly, prickly feeling of eating a pineapple that you get on your lips and in your mouth when you eat a bunch of pineapple at once? That would happen to your penis, but it would happen faster, and burn more, because the penis is a very sensitive organ.
It's not every day that you come across enticing recommendations for 19th century nonfiction, well done! 😁
[citation needed]
Be forewarned: it's definitively from the 1870s. They didn't yet understand cellular respiration, there are a couple of seriously racist paragraphs (most notably one in which the article author states as a well known fact that the "hyperborean" people are all candle thieves, because supposedly they ate the candles. They didn't yet understand the nature of dinosaurs, either. However, the chemistry experiments seem fun, if potentially deadly at times, including some terrifying instructions on how to make chlorine gas, capture it, combine it with hydrogen gas, seal the container, then expose it to light and watch it explode as the photosensitive reaction makes hydrochloric acid. Fun times. Anyway, it's a very entertaining read, and there are six volumes of the stuff. I've only gone through the first thus far.