3o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



crepe-like flowers, five to eight inches across, pure white in color with 

 a rounded mass of yellow stamens in the center. 



The Deserts 



To transcontinental travelers the deserts are bleak, forbidding wastes, 

 the very antithesis of life, and are passed with a shudder. But to him 

 who follows their shifting trails with burro and pack saddle they open 

 up a new world ; animals, plants and the very rocks wholly unlike those 

 of his well-trodden paths through fields and meadows. He may travel 

 for days over the desert without meeting a familiar plant, no conifers, 

 no oak, nor rose, no buttercups or violets. Plants, instead of spreading 

 out broad green leaves to the friendly sunshine, protect themselves from 

 the withering rays of a burning sun by easting off their leaves and 

 forcing their twigs and branches to earn - on their work, or by reducing 

 the leaves in size and covering them either with wax. as does the 

 creosote-bush, or with a dense layer of impervious cuticle, as does the 

 desert holly, or with a gray mat of soft down, as do some of the daleas. 

 Others, as the cacti, store up water in their thickened fleshy stems. 

 Still others, members of the gourd family, develop enormous roots for 

 water storage. Pondering on the significance of all these strange types, 

 the wonderful adaptations, the development and modification of struc- 

 tures to meet these severe tests of endurance, one stands amazed at the 

 powers of nature, realizing as never before the vital force of climatic 

 environment. 



Low, straggly shrubs of subdued tone and thorny cacti are the com- 

 mon plants of the desert. Of these the most universal is the creosote- 

 bush with its waxy leaves, bright yellow flowers and all-pervading odor. 

 Along living streams grow willows and cottonwoods, but desert trees 

 are few in number. Where a little moisture is permanently retained, 

 mesquit, palo verde and ironwood may be found. In the Mojave 

 Desert the most striking feature is the yucca, which forms weird, fan- 

 tastic groves scattered orchard-like over many square miles, the Joshua 

 tree of the early Mormon settlers. On the western rim of the Colorado 

 Desert, fringing the base of the southern California mountains, are sev- 

 eral groves of the desert palm. An especially fine group is in Palm 

 Canon, splendid trees with straight, unbranched trunks eighty to one 

 hundred feet high, crowned by great tufts of spreading fan-shaped 

 leaves and clothed sometimes nearly to the base with withered leaves 

 that lie pendant along the sides in great thatch-like masses. Here is 

 a veritable Saharan oasis, and there eight miles away and ten thousand 

 feet above, stands the summit of San Jacinto, harboring typical arctic 

 plants around its lingering patches of snow. 



Such are the contrasts of California. 



