ON THE PACIFIC COAST 337 



them songsters, and all of them more pleasantly garrulous than 

 any similar assemblage of little birds I have met with elsewhere 

 in the world. The flowers are followed by pendulous, flattish, 

 yellow pods, 6 to 8 inches long, about a finger's breadth and half 

 as thick, containing several thin flat seeds, immersed in a 

 sweetish mucilaginous compactly spongy but brittle substance, 

 which is the nutritive part. These pods are greedily devoured 

 by horses, cows, and goats, but especially by asses, which are 

 more numerous than any other domestic animals. It is a very 

 concentrated and heating kind of food, and I have seen horses 

 after eating it chew the leaves of the castor-oil plant, or any kind 

 of rubbish, to counteract its stimulating properties. . . . 



The Algarrobo secretes an inflammable gum -resin, which 

 exudes from cracks in the bark and coagulates into a blackish 

 mass. Advantage is taken of it to prostrate the trees by fire, 

 when it is required to clear the ground for cultivation. Cutting 

 them down is scarcely ever resorted to, the timber being so hard 

 as soon to render useless the best-tempered axe. The method 

 employed is this : A truncheon of wood, alight at one end, is 

 laid on the ground with that end touching the tree to windward. 

 The trunk soon takes fire, and (especially if the wind be strong) 

 is in a few hours burnt right through nearly horizontally, the part 

 destroyed rarely exceeding from half a foot to a foot in breadth ; 

 and being thus prostrated, its still burning end is covered with 

 earth to extinguish the fire. There is no better material for fuel 

 than Algarrobo wood, and its very great hardness and durability 

 would make it a most desirable timber for any kind of con- 

 struction, were it not that it grows so crooked and is so intractable 

 to work. 



Potreros from which animals have been long excluded 

 sometimes grow so thick, from two kinds of lianas which fill up 

 the intervals of the trees, as to be impassable. A species of 

 Rhamnus, called Lipe, armed with formidable decussate spines, 

 and producing minute 4-5-merous ilowers, followed by small edible 

 black berries, supports itself against the Algarrobos and climbs 

 high among their branches. When it grows alone and has 

 room to spread, it forms large round bushes, each mam \. 

 in diameter, and 12 to 15 feet high. Bushes of Lipe, scattered 

 over the bare ground, look at a distance not unlike the small 

 groves of hollies or other evergreens that stud the sanded or 

 gravelled surface of an English shrubbery. In these bushes hide 

 by da) r numerous foxes, which come out by night in <|iie>t ol fund. 

 They are as fond of melons as .Fsop's fox was of grapes, and do not 

 despise them even when green, so they can get at them. Li/ards 

 and a few snakes also seek the shelter of the Lipe. Flock - ol 

 small birds roost there by night, and by day pick the berries. 



The companion of the Lipe is a rampant Xyctaginea (Crypio- 



VOL. II 



