LENGTH OF THE LIFE CYCLE OF A CLIMBING BAMBOO 
89 
to the general condition existing throughout the mountains. A noteworthy 
feature of the exception, however, was the fact that these healthy, green 
plants were all in a single and comparatively small area. The possibility 
of explaining their persistence by some external cause is, therefore, greater 
than would be the case had several distinct scattered groups been found. 
The region in which these living plants are growing is one experiencing 
the extreme of mountain aridity above 4,000 feet. The ridge is hot and dry, 
Fig. 4, Seedlings of Chusquea ahietifolia. 
and covered with vegetation characteristically xerophytic {Pteris aquilina, 
Gleichenia Mathewsii, Agave americana). Morce's Gap trail and Blue 
Mountain Peak, on the other hand, where Chusquea is, with few exceptions, 
to be found only as old, dead plants and young seedlings, are moist regions 
characterized by hygrophilous plants. -^Immediately below the dry area 
where the patch of living bamboos exists, there is a moist, shaded gulch 
where no living, mature Chusquea was found; for here, in an environment 
like that at Morce's Gap and on Blue Mountain Peak, the old bamboos are 
dead and seedlings are abundant. Here also flourishes a hygrophilous 
flora of tree ferns and succulent herbs. It seems, therefore, reasonable to 
conclude that the climbing bamboo has in this more arid region in some man- 
ner assumed an altered life cycle. The single green specimen, already 
referred to, found near Morce's Gap was growing on the hot and dry south- 
west slope of the mountain, a spot differing markedly from the nearby, 
shaded, semi-moist regions along the trail where Chusquea was represented 
by an abundance of dead plants and of living seedlings. 
