IN CALIFORNIA 175 



cida}. They are small plants, a few inches high, 

 growing in bunches as though in union there were 

 strength to resist the assaults of the desert droughti- 

 ness, and after the manner of desert plants they 

 have put on special armor for the occasion. In the 

 case of Notholaena Parryi, this consists of a tangle 

 of white hairs covering the upper side of the leaflets, 

 and a denser brown tangle of woolliness covering 

 the surface beneath. The other two species prefer 

 powder and sticky glands. All these equipments 

 serve the same purpose of reducing the evaporation 

 of the plant's small stock of hard-gathered moisture 

 in th'at land of little rain. There is another Noth- 

 olaena which the rambler among the foot hills of 

 Southern California, is pretty sure to encounter 

 growing in the crevices of dry shady boulders, and 

 popularly known as the cotton-fern. Its clustered 

 fronds, which are four or five inches long, with 

 blackish stipes of about the same length, are thickly 

 covered above and below with cottony white hairs, 

 which are a marked characteristic of the species, and 

 have given rise to the common name. 



At the desert's edge grows one of the rarest ferns 

 in the world, unknown to science until 1881 when it 

 was discovered by Mr. S. B. Parish in Andreas 

 Canon, a gorge in the eastern steeps of Mount San 

 Jacinto opening to the Colorado Desert, near Palm 



