The Alamogordo Desert 169 



as every student of botany well knows, is the most plastic 

 sort of an organism in the world, responding in every 

 sort of way to its environment. We who study the mi- 

 croscopic structure of the humblest plants understand 

 the limitless possibilities here. When we reflect that the 

 suppression of a single cell at the critical moment may 

 change the direction of an axis or alter the contour of a 

 leaf, it is hard to set too high an estimate upon the pos- 

 sible response made by a simple plant to environmental 

 variations, however delicate. We who study the physi- 

 ology of the plant, peer into its changing cells, and strive 

 in imagination to reproduce the marvelously intricate 

 reactions physical, chemical that forever shift and 

 play within those narrow limits we need not be told 

 that every vegetable cell has in it opportunities a thou- 

 sandfold to match and meet all the subtle changes sug- 

 gested by the slow-creeping but implacable forces that 

 work out the physiognomy of this time-worn earth. A 

 little more calcium here, a little more phosphorus there, 

 sulphates, nitrates, and the rest, and the thing is done. 

 Nay, when we even think of the form in which all energy 

 comes from yon distant sun, and the delicate machinery 

 on which it plays, we need seek no further occasion for 

 the intervention of every sort of outer cosmic force. Not 

 a tree on all the Iowa prairies but shows in its every 

 lineament, in its very expression, a response to the Iowa 

 environment ; and so, we may be sure, every desert plant 

 records in its present form and stature all the affirma- 

 tions, all the responses it has made in all the centuries 

 to the bidding, the silent bidding, the most gentle coax- 

 ing, of the world external. For, note you, the call for 



