remarkable for their simplicity and effectiveness, and some- 

 times produce seeming anomalies. We know that all plants 

 of the Temperate Zone show a flexibility or changeableness 

 T^ hose intensity varies with each species and generally wiiii 



fined within very narrow limits when we consider the 'factors 

 with which the plant has to deal. When any change occurs 

 that is great the plant dies. We know with reasonable cer- 

 tainty that for several thousand years there has been no appre- 

 ciable change in our climate, and as there is no evidence of 

 Jin internal power of change to produce development in 

 plants such as we see in the human race, we infer that for a 

 long period the flora has been practically the same as now. 

 This view is strengthened by the fossils found in the Pliocene 

 Tertiary formation in Payette river region, and the still more 

 recent fossils of the Bonneville beds of our region. The spe- 

 cies are nearly the same as now though many of them pass un- 

 der different names from lack of a proper comparison with the 

 present flora. As the squirrels hole up and the bears hibernate 

 and so exist far to the north of the place of their origin, so 

 we find multitudes of plants which throw up herbaeous stems 

 and luxuriate in the balmy air of summer, storing up nourish- 

 ment in their roots, and when fall comes they fold their dead 

 stems over them and lie dormant in the most intense winter's 

 cold only to come to life again in the spring. The same ten- 

 dency is shown in the shrubs and trees which drop all their 

 leaves and thus greatly reduce their resisting surfaces during 

 the winter. Anomalies occur in the pine family which exist 

 in the very places where we would least expect them, and 

 they still further surprise us by growing almost within the 

 Tropics, although they are scarcely found at all in the deserts 

 where their leaf structure would seem to be specially useful. 

 In a region like ours plants have a double danger to face, the 

 cold of winter, and the dryness of summer. This is admirably 

 provided against by the segos, onions and the like, which 

 bloom early while the ground is moist from spring snows and 

 rains, and by the time the showers cease have fruited and 

 dried up leaving only the bulbs and seeds, the former so prc^ 

 tected by the depth or papery scales or interlaced fibers as to 

 resist the drougth and intense heat of summer as well as the 

 cold of winter. The sego has an additional factor in produc- 

 ing a new bulb each year below the old one, and so as it grows 



