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30 Botanizing on the Colorado Desert. [January, 
and swine are very fond of these mezquit beans, as they are 
called, and fatten rapidly when fed on them. Moreover, the — 
“mezquit meal,” which Indians and Mexicans manufacture by _ 
drying and grinding these pods and their contents, is perhaps the 
most nutritious breadstuff in use among any people, barbarous or a ] 
civilized. In these regions where no grass grows, and where the 
growing of the cereals is limited to the valleys of rivers that are 4 
few and far between, the importance of the mezquit, from an 
economic point of view can hardly be overestimated. The wood 3 
burns with an intensity of heat that is unfavorable to the nicest 4 7 
results in baking, and also destructive to iron; hence the few set q : 
lers on mezquit lands who brought stoves along, use any other 
wood rather than mezquit to burn in them, but the best of char- _ : 
coal is made from it, They assure us that this species of timber — 
possesses the singular property of seasoning without undergoing ; 
any perceptible shrinkage. Freighters and immigrants pret 
over these desert regions, where of course there are no such things — 
as wagon shops for hundreds of miles together, being obliged to — 
do their own wagon repairing, always replace the broken “poked 
or felly with one made from green mezquit, and the new piece | 
does not shrink away and become loose and useless as it would 
if made of, for example, a stick of unseasoned oak.  - 
Besides this common and most useful species there is another, + 
called the screw mezquit (Prosopis pubescens Benth.), on account | 
of its short pods being closely twisted into the shape of a screw. 
This is a smaller tree, of no importance except that its pods hav 
the same nutritious properties as those of the larger and more 
common sort. a 
Tete 
Having now become familiar with all the principal trees, bushes 
and herbs of the great, desolate wilderness, I was not sorry when 
I knew myself to be approaching the banks of the Colorado and. 3 
the habitations of civilized men. During five days I had never — 
therefore a new and rather pleasant species of incident that befell 
me when within thirty-five miles of my journey’s end I meta 
pedestrian of my own color. It was a fair haired, handsome — 
French boy of eighteen or twenty years, who came plodding 
along through the heated sands in his stocking feet, and carrying — 
over his shoulder a pair of new boots, His brand new suit of © 
