IN CALIFORNIA 57 



a tender-hearted tourist, when the dry season has 

 set in and California pastures are as brown as an 

 eastern November, has had his sympathy awakened 

 by seeing bands of cattle or sheep nosing over the 

 clods of a barren field in an apparently hopeless 

 search for feed. It seemed like a case for the So- 

 ciety for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, but in 

 reality the beasts were licking up the pods of the 

 bur-clover. Curiously enough the stems and leaves 

 of this plant, which is a close relative of alfalfa, 1 

 have little or no attraction for the animals ; but the 

 queer little coiled seed-pods about the size of peas 

 and quite dry and prickly, are palatable to them and 

 fattening. 



The wild black mustard (Brassica nigra), which 

 is an influential plant in the spring landscape, cov- 

 ering vast areas with rippling lakes of fragrant yel- 

 low bloom, is another naturalized foreigner. It has 

 spread from inconsiderable beginnings, perhaps in 

 Mission times, when it may have been sown in the 



i Hay in California is usually not cured grass, but the dried stalks 

 of the cereal grains, oats, barley and wheat (cut before fully ripe) 

 and the leguminous plant alfalfa. The last, used, in the Old World 

 as fodder for at least 2500 years, was introduced into Spanish-Amer- 

 ica in the sixteenth century. Its culture on a large scale in Cali- 

 fornia seems to have begun about 1854 from seed got from Chile, 

 though it is incredible that the Franciscan Missionaries should not 

 have introduced it in their day with other economical plants, and 

 probably they did. 



