THE FODDER PLANT FOR ARID REGIONS. 
3 
a combination of the best qualities of both parents with surprising productiveness of slabs 
for feeding. The work is still in progress but on a still larger scale and now the improved 
Opuntias promise to be one of the most important food-producers of this age, some of these 
new creations grown from the same lot of seed yielding fully ten times as much feed as 
others under exactly the same conditions. 
HARDY SPINELESS OPUNTIAS READY EOR THE HYBRIDIZER. 
Among the very numerous wild seedling Opuntias, partially thornless ones have appeared 
from time to time and these have been growing generally unnoticed here and there in every 
part of the earth where the thorny ones grew, the seeds no doubt scattered by birds and 
other agencies. Some of these bore good fruits and have been locally^ cultivated, but so 
far as known have never received specific horticultural names or descriptions though 
the fruits of these and the thorny ones have long been used extensively as food and are 
the principal source of food for millions of human beings for about three months in each 
year. 
Systematic work for their improvement has shown how pliable and readily moulded 
is this unique, hardy denizen of rocky, drought-cursed, wind-swept, sun-blistered districts 
and how readily it adapts itself to more fertile soils and how rapidly it improves, under 
cultivation and improved conditions. 
Some one asks: “Won’t they run wild again and produce thorns, when placed under 
desert conditions?” 
Has the “Burbank” plum which though introduced twenty-two years ago and is now 
more widely grown than any other plum on this earth, shown a tendency to be different 
in Africa, Borneo, Japan, Egypt, Madagascar or France? No, it is the same everywhere 
and the residents of Chicago, Auckland, London, San Francisco, New York and Valparaiso 
consume them in great (and rapidly increasing) numbers of carloads each season. The 
