A DESERT FRUIT. 109 



A DESERT FRUIT. 



By GRANT ALLEN. 



WHO knows tlie Mediterranean, knows the prickly pear. Not 

 that that quaint and uncanny-looking cactus, with its yel- 

 low blossoms and bristling fruits that seem to grow paradoxically 

 out of the edge of thick, fleshy leaves is really a native of Italy, 

 Spain, and North Africa, where it now abounds on every sun- 

 smitten hillside. Like Mr. Henry James and Mr. Marion Craw- 

 ford, the Barbary fig, as the French call it, is, in point of fact, an 

 American citizen, domiciled and half naturalized on this side of 

 the Atlantic, but redolent still at heart of its Columbian origin. 

 Nothing is more common, indeed, than to see classical pictures of 

 the Alma-Tadema school not, of course, from the brush of the 

 master himself, who is impeccable in such details, but fair works 

 of decent imitators in which Caia or Marcia leans gracefully in 

 her white stole on one pensive elbow against a marble lintel, 

 beside a court-yard decorated with a Pompeiian basin, and over- 

 grown with prickly pear or " American aloes." I need hardly say 

 that, as a matter of plain historical fact, neither cactuses nor agaves 

 were known in Europe till long after Christopher Columbus had 

 steered his wandering bark to the sandy shores of Cat's Island in 

 the Bahamas. (I have seen Cat's Island with these very eyes, and 

 can honestly assure you that its shores are sandy.) But this is 

 only one among the many pardonable little inaccuracies of paint- 

 ers, who thrust scarlet geraniums from the Cape of Good Hope 

 into the fingers of Aspasia, or supply King Solomon in all his 

 glory with Japanese lilies of the most recent introduction. 



At the present day, it is true, both the prickly-pear cactus and 

 the American agave (which the world at large insists upon con- 

 founding with the aloe, a member of a totally distinct family) 

 have spread themselves in an apparently wild condition over all 

 the rocky coasts both of southern Europe and of northern Africa. 

 The alien desert weeds have fixed their roots firmly in the sun- 

 baked clefts of Ligurian Apennines ; the tall candelabrum of the 

 "Western agave has reared its great spike of branching blossoms 

 (which flower, not once in a century, as legend avers, but once in 

 some fifteen years or so) on all the basking hillsides of the Mau- 

 ritanian Atlas. But for the origin, and therefore for the evolu- 

 tionary history, of either plant, we must look away from the shore 

 of the inland sea to the arid expanse of the Mexican desert. It 

 was there, among the sweltering rocks of the Tierras Calientes, 

 that these ungainly cactuses first learned to clothe themselves in 

 prickly mail, to store in their loose tissues an abundant supply of 

 sticky moisture, and to set at defiance the persistent attacks of all 



