ON THE PACIFIC COAST 337 
them songsters, and all of them more pleasantly garrulous than 
any similar assemblage of little birds I have met with elsewhere 
in the world. The flowers are followed by pendulous, flattish, 
yellow pods, 6 to 8 inches long, about a finger's breadth and half 
as thick, containing several thin flat seeds, immersed in a 
sweetish mucilaginous compactly spongy but brittle substance, 
which is the nutritive part. These pods are greedily devoured 
by horses, cows, and goats, but especially by asses, which are 
more numerous than any other domestic animals. It is a very 
concentrated and heating kind of food, and I have seen horses 
after eating it chew the leaves of the castor-oil plant, or any kind 
of rubbish, to counteract its stimulating properties. . . . 
The Algarrobo secretes an inflammable gum -resin, which 
exudes from cracks in the bark and coagulates into a blackish 
mass. Advantage is taken of it to prostrate the trees by fire, 
when it is required to clear the ground for cultivation. Cutting 
them down is scarcely ever resorted to, the timber being so hard 
as soon to render useless the best-tempered axe. The method 
employed is this : A truncheon of wood, alight at one end, is 
laid on the ground with that end touching the tree to windward. 
The trunk soon takes fire, and (especially if the wind be strong) 
is in a few hours burnt right through nearly horizontally, the part 
destroyed rarely exceeding from half a foot to a foot in breadth ; 
and being thus prostrated, its still burning end is covered with 
earth to extinguish the fire. There is no better material for fuel 
than Algarrobo wood, and its very great hardness and durability 
would make it a most desirable timber for any kind of con- 
struction, were it not that it grows so crooked and is so intractable 
to work. 
Potreros from which animals have been long excluded 
sometimes grow so thick, from two kinds of lianas which fill up 
the intervals of the trees, as to be impassable. A species of 
Rhamnus, called Lipe, armed with formidable decussate spines, 
and producing minute 4-5-merous flowers, followed by small edible 
black berries, supports itself against the Algarrobos and climbs 
high among their branches. When it grows alone and has 
room to spread, it forms large round bushes, each many yards 
in diameter, and 12 to 15 feet high. Bushes of Lipe, scattered 
over the bare ground, look at a distance not unlike the small 
groves of hollies or other evergreens that stud the sanded or 
gravelled surface of an English shrubbery. In these bushes hide 
by day numerous foxes, which come out by night in quest of food. 
They are as fond of melons as yf^sop's fox was of grapes, and do not 
despise them even when green, so they can get at them. Lizards 
and a few snakes also seek the shelter of the Lipe. Flocks of 
small birds roost there by night, and by day pick the berries. 
The companion of the Lipe is a rampant Nyctaginea (Crypto- 
VOL. II Z 
