6 OUR NATIONAL PARKS 



awaiting them all, unless awakening public opin- 

 ion comes forward to stop it. Even the great 

 deserts in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and New Mex- 

 ico, which offer so little to attract settlers, and 

 which a few years ago pioneers were afraid of, 

 as places of desolation and death, are now taken 

 as pastures at the rate of one or two square 

 miles per cow, and of course their plant treasures 

 are passing away, — the delicate abronias, 

 phloxes, gilias, etc. Only a few of the bitter, 

 thorny, unbitable shrubs are left, and the sturdy 

 cactuses that defend themselves with bayonets 

 and spears. 



Most of the wild plant wealth of the East also 

 has vanished, — gone into dusty history. Only 

 vestiges of its glorious prairie and woodland 

 wealth remain to bless humanity in boggy, rocky, 

 unploughable places. Fortunately, some of these 

 are purely wild, and go far to keep Nature's love 

 visible. White water-lilies, with rootstocks deep 

 and safe in mud, still send up every summer a 

 Milky Way of starry, fragrant flowers around a 

 thousand lakes, and many a tuft of wild grass 

 waves its panicles on mossy rocks, beyond reach 

 of trampling feet, in company with saxifrages, 

 bluebells, and ferns. Even in the midst of farm- 

 ers' fields, precious sphagnum bogs, too soft 

 for the feet of cattle, are preserved with their 

 charming plants unchanged, — chiogenes, An- 

 dromeda, Kalmia, Linnaea, Arethusa, etc. Ca- 



