NEW CREATIONS. 213 



Something over ten years ago Mr. Luther Burbank, whose 

 work is only now attracting the attention it deserves, began 

 cultivating the cactus. It has, therefore, been a long process, 

 has entailed great labor, and has required an exceptional de- 

 gree of persistence and patience, but to-day the work is prac- 

 tically done. "For fifty years," writes Mr. Burbank, "I have 

 known of thornless opuntias (cacti). Among the thousands 

 of varieties which I have produced, the variations of fruit, 

 foliage and growth are as distinct as among apples, peaches, 

 etc." In the variety here illustrated the hard and deadly fiber 

 has been eliminated and a pulpy substance substituted, tooth- 

 some and nutritious. The fruit is in shape sometimes nearly 

 that of the apple, sometimes that of a short, thick cucumber 

 covered externally with slight protuberances all that remains 

 of the once forbidding thorn. Within, the meat is of a yel- 

 lowish, golden hue, and its flavor gives a new experience 

 to the human tongue. To one man it suggests a melon, to 

 another a peach, to another a pineapple, to another a plum, 

 but no one can define it because it is like nothing hitherto 

 known. The new fruit may be eaten raw, but it also sub- 

 serves many culinary purposes, while its leaves, those thick, 

 fleshy lobes which grow so oddly the one out of another, make 

 excellent preserves. 



Cattle devour this cultivated cactus with avidity, and since 

 analysis shows that it is full of nutriment, if offers great 

 promise as a forage food where herds and flocks have never 

 found forage before. It grows with great rapidity, scores 

 of pounds of healthful fruit being the product of each plant 

 during the year, and the plain possibility of planting and 

 cultivating it throughout a region where animal life has hith- 

 erto found but scanty sustenance and where the solitude and 



