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Show BY PATH AND TRAIL. 163 California. Within this circle the Spaniards were mak ing history when the states of the East were a wilderness, and New York had as yet no place on the map of America. The mountains and the deserts remain as they were when the Spanish priest Marco, of Nizza, in 1539, crossed them on his way to the Moqui towns of Quivera. The vegetation even has undergone no change, for here, all around, and before you, are the giant Sua-haros, or Candelabrum cacti, the ocotilla, the Spanish dagger plant, with bayonets all a- bristle, the palo verde, the mesquite, prickly pear, sagebrush, and all the won derful varieties of desert flora for which the Arizona deserts are notorious. The professor of botany in the University of Arizona tells me there are in Arizona 3,000 varieties of flower-carrying plants, and 300 different kinds of grasses. With the exception of the verbena and a few others, all the indigenous flowers are odorless, owing, it is said, to the absence of moisture in the air. All desert plants are protected against the greed or hunger, or, let us say, wanton destruction of man and animal, by spines or thorns. More than 680 varieties of the cactus alone have been discovered, catalogued and classified. All deserts have a botany of their own and a flora of infinite possi bilities off value, and in the deserts of Arizona have been found plants of great medicinal value, many of them with unique and interesting characteristics. It is a very curious fact that the only varieties of the cactus without thorns known to exist in this region, are found growing in rock projections and ledges beyond the reach of animals. This was explained to me on the theory that, at some time in the past, this kind of cactus was common enough in the mountains, but that gophers, rabbits and other des- |