PREFACE xi 



who made hopeful suggestions — "I guess you'll 

 boom up this section now, won't you, say? Finest 

 land in the State" — and so on; nor their puzzled 

 or pitying glances when I made the only possible 

 reply, that I did not, could not, and would not 

 boom ; was, in fact, even averse to booms and boom- 

 ers; and was more enthralled by desert sunsets than 

 by desert dairies, astounding as these might be. In a 

 word, it is the desert as desert — God's desert, not 

 man's — that engaged my interest, and that, as I 

 this moment call it up before my inward eye, seems 

 to me the most memorable, in its totality of impres- 

 siveness, of all natural objects that I have met. 



But I confess that the fascination of the untamed 

 desert has proved to be of too subtle a quality for 

 words of mine to render. That would necessarily be 

 true, of course, of anybody's attempt in any field of 

 Nature: but it would be tenfold true with respect 

 to the desert, and I will be bold to say that it would 

 be true without regard to the person in the case. 

 Whether it be that the desert is too intrinsically 

 alien to our psychology, or for some other reason, too 

 baffling to trace, I believe it to be the fact that its 

 genius is the rarest and the most elusive of all the 

 elements that make up the wonder of this transcend- 

 ent world. No "last word" on the desert will ever 

 be written; no statement, I mean, that, to those who 

 know the subject in any real degree, will not seem 

 to fail of getting at the essence. 



It is a pleasure to record botanical obligations to 

 my friend Mr. S. B. Parish, of San Bernardino, Cali- 

 fornia, whose thorough knowledge of the flora of 



