BOTANICAL GAZETTE. 



to us, we must not forget what they have cost, for nowhere in this 

 country is botanizing accompanied by such discomfort and actual suf- 

 fering. Nature seems to delight in guarding her treasures well and has 

 surrounded her choicest gifts with difficulty and danger; and as if sand 

 and heat were not sufficient to warn off the intruding botanist in this 

 land of the Apache, the vegetation also puts on a most forbidding as- 

 pect and wrings from him a tribute of blood. The last Californian 

 contains a spicy account of a ''Botanical Wedding Trip" made to this 

 inhospitable region by Mr. J. G. Lemmon and wife. The hardships 

 they endured in their eager search for plants are almost incredible, 

 but the results amply repaid them. Add to intolerable heat, glaring 

 sand and rattlesnakes, the following condition of things, and it will be 

 seen that our plant.-, are dearly bought. "The way was along a. sandy 

 creek-wash, with patches of boulders and occasional steep ascents, the 

 whole way besef with cacti of varied degrees of formidable armature, 

 from the innocent pin-cushion cactus, that only catches to your feet and 

 clothing with its fishhook spines while the other straight spines tickle 

 you. to the horrid, wide-branching tree cactus, with its long, glisten- 

 ing barbed spines, that completely clothe limbs and buds, the latter 

 being shed off so frequently, and in such abundance, that they form 

 high mounds under the trees, and often are scattered about for 

 many rods. Any of these spines is strong enough to pierce through 

 a cowhide boot-leg; and when it reaches the flesh you are gone. 

 The retrorse barbs cause it to continue entering the more you strug 

 gle. The best thing to do is to break it off at once where you can, 

 and let the rest fester and come away with the pus. 



"Almost as cruel are the bushes of an acacia, appropriately called 

 "cats's-claws," that crowd in the trail, and reach their slender limbs 

 across the way, armed every half inch with pairs of strong, recurved 

 thorns, that tap your veins unawares, and cause you to add drops of 

 blood to the perspiration that drips almost constantly from your per- 

 son." 



"Perhaps no torture known exceeds that produced by attempt- 

 ing t> extract these i cactus) spines from human flesh. One of the fa- 

 vorite tortures inflicted upon captive whites by the Apaches is to strip 

 their victims of clothing, tie their hands and feet, then hurl them 

 against these cacti, rolling them with their lances over upon the bro- 

 ken-down branches, until the poor wretches die from the fiendish tor- 

 ment. Animals in Arizona, impelled by hunger or thirst, often ex- 

 pose their noses to these attacks, when they become mad with pain and 

 die amidst frantic efforts to remove the burs. It is the worst country 

 in the world for sheep. I have seen unsophisticated lambs that had 

 caught a bur from lying down. In attempting to remove it with their 

 teeth, the nose had become attached to the side, and death from star- 

 vation was inevitable." 



So long as such a condition of things exists the average botanist 

 will be perfectly content to pay from seven and a half to ten dollars 

 per hundred species and enjoy them without such an outlay of sweat 

 and blood. 



