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habit, naturally supposing that these wee things must be different 
in species from plants that I had seen elsewhere only as tall and 
robust when in flower. A little more experience, however, con- 
vinced me that these Liliputians were merely taking time by the 
forelock. 
Still another adaptation, excited apparently by the conditions 
under which they exist, is the extraordinary number of seeds 
formed by many plants and scattered over the soil in which they, 
grow. This habit is not confined to species which usually yield 
great numbers of seeds, but seems common to all the desert flora. 
Thus a little violet which seldom attains a height of three inches, 
common about Caldera, often exhibits from thirty to forty pods 
full of seeds upon a single plant. When one looks down upon it, 
he can see only a mass of yellow flowers and fruit pods. I might 
mention many other plants in which the same peculiarity is 
noticeable. 
One other apparent adaptation deserves mention. It is said 
that a majority of the desert plants are shrubs, or at least, are 
suffruticose, and this accords with my own observation. I found 
that such growths are in the habit of shedding their leaves in the 
summer instead of winter, thus reversing the ordinary process of 
nature. By this means they reduce their vital expenditure to a 
minimum at a season when they need, to husband their utmost 
strength in order to resist long and continued dryness. This leaves 
them free to exert their full powers at a period when they are 
most likely to imbibe the revivifying moisture. Aided in this by 
their thick, long and knotty roots and close, non-evaporating 
bark, these shrubs, which seem to be nothing but dead stocks in 
the summer, can withstand even several years of drought. 
After premising this much concerning the locality and the 
flora in general, I will give some account of my own explorations 
in the Desert of Atacama. It was my good fortune to reach 
Caldera, the sea-port of Copiapo, in the month of September 
last, which is early spring time in that latitude. It also happened 
to be a year when this rare flora had sprung up, a thing which 
I understood from residents had not occurred for several years. 
previously. A single rain had fallen in the month of June, and 
at the time of my visit the plants were in full bloom. Had the 
