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Show 166 BY PATH AND TEAIL. surprised to hear from the distinguished professor, as without doubt you will be to read, that if the deserts of the earth could be brought into one area they would form a continent larger than all of North America. The wonderful and peculiar vegetation of the deserts has time and again invited and received the attention of learned botanists, but not until the founding of this Car negie laboratory was any systematic and continuous study made of desert plant life. The assistant in charge of the botanical department corresponds with the famous botanists of the world, and is daily mailing to and re ceiving specimens of desert flowers and plants from all parts of Asia, Africa and Australia. It may interest my readers to learn that, in the val ley of the Salt Eiver, in Arizona, the United States gov ernment reclamation service has well under way one of the most remarkable engineering enterprises for the irrigation of desert lands ever undertaken. Before a hole was drilled for the actual work in this almost inac cessible quarter of the Salt Eiver Canyon, a wagon road twenty- live miles long had to be blasted from the side of the fearful gorge. Fifteen miles of this road pre sented almost insurmountable difficulties, for it had to be run through the wildest and most precipitous portions of the awesome canyons. Then began the herculean task of preparation for controlling the turbulent waters of the river, which in the late spring become a rushing tor rent. In a narrow part of this canyon the men, under expert hydrographic and civil engineers, are now build ing a wall of solid masonry, which, when completed, will rise to a height of 270 feet. It will inclose a lake of stor-aged water twenty- five miles long and 200 feet deep. Sluices and canals will carry water from this artificial |