THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 75 



like a remnant of earlier days if its acquaintance could be made 

 more readily ; but who can really know a plant so armed with 

 spines? Cattle would gladly eat it, but when they attempt to 

 do so, they are almost sure to get thorns in their tongues. 

 Often we saw prickly pears whose leaves had been gingerly 

 nibbled in attempts to get something green and juicy to relieve 

 the monotony of a diet of dry grass which a winter drought 

 had forced upon the cattle from September until the following 

 summer. The cholla and other branching forms are too 

 thorny to be eaten at all by animals. Their loose-jointed 

 branches often break off as the cattle brush past them and 

 hang from their necks or flanks rankling for days. 



But the archaic appearance is deceiitful. The cactus 

 family is no remnant of a far past age. On the contrary, it is 

 one of the newest of the great families of plants. No real 

 cacti have ever been found in the fossil state. The family 

 seems to have originated so recently that it has not had time 

 to spread beyond the limits of America. From Mexico, which 

 was probably its original home, it has spread northward and 

 eastward, so that one energetic little species of prickly pear is 

 found for away on the sunny side of steep hills in rainy Con- 

 necticut; while other species have penetrated far into South 

 America. Most families of plants are much more widely dis- 

 tributed than this and have representatives in both the Old 

 World and the New. The cacti appear to have originated 

 so recently that since they began to spread there has been no 

 land connection of such kind that they could migrate from 

 one hemisphere to the other. To be sure the Mediterranean 

 countries are full of the prickly pear. Everyone who has been 

 in Greece in the autumn has seen venders with two baskets, one 

 full of plump succulent fruits of a yellowish or reddish tint 

 and three or four inches long, and the other seemingly filled 

 with rotten fruit of the same kind. When a buyer comes along 

 the purpose of the second basket becomes apparent. The 

 vender with a dexterous sweep of his knife, strips the skin 



