THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



50 



it — "I seek acquaintance with Nature ... I take infinite 

 pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for in- 

 stance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and 

 then to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy 

 that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn 

 out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and 

 mutilated it in many places." 



For the immediate present, however, the saguaro insists 

 upon being paradoxical in still another respect. In all prob- 

 abihty there are now, or at least were quite recently, more 

 saguaros in southern Arizona than there ever were before. 

 The primeval forest of giant cacti which the first white 

 man saw was probably neither as thick nor as imposing 

 as the one you and I can see today! 



Careful study of the composition of the existing forests 

 seems to demonstrate conclusively that they experienced 

 a rather short period of unusual prosperity not so very 

 long ago, that neither before nor since that time did the 

 species ever reproduce itself so abundantly or so vigor- 

 ously. This does not mean that young saguaros are not 

 even at this moment moving slowly through the stages 

 of their growth. One may find them a few inches or a few 

 feet high, usually in the shade of some bush or some cactus 

 of a different species which shaded them from the. too 

 fierce sun during their earliest years. But from the propor- 

 tion of existing specimens of approximately the same age, 

 it seems clear that about two hundred years ago conditions 

 were more nearly perfect than they were before or have 

 been since. Nowadays, so it is estimated, only about one 

 out of every 275,000 seeds reaches maturity. Once the 

 proportion must, for reasons not definitely known, have 

 been much greater. And since the saguaro is so demand- 



