
2 THE STORY OF CACTUS 

The third change in these curious plants found one division with all pads 
and the other all trunks and stems. The Napalea pads sometimes grow to 
twenty by thirty inches and the old pads at the ground look like the trunk 
of a tree. 
We have seen the trunk of the Opuntia fulgida (20) over a foot thick and 
the plant over fifteen feet high in Arizona. 
The Opuntia braziliensis has both pads and thickened trunk. It seems 
to be the link which proves the third change in the shape of these interesting 
plants. 
The Platyopuntia or Pad Cactus changed with the climate. As the seeds 
were carried farther and farther north, the Pads grew smaller and smaller and 
the plants learned to drain their water in the winter. The Opuntia opuntia (17) 
do the same in Canada, shrivelling themselves up and living down close to the ~ 
ground, but in the spring they will get full of water and stand erect again. 
The Opuntia fragilis in Colorado also stays dormant during the winter months. 
This is one of the smallest of the Platyopuntia, rarely getting over an inch 
per pad. 
The Cylindropuntia (25) is the forerunner of the Cereus. as the climate 
became dryer and dryer, the Cereus got larger and larger until they changed 
into the present Carnegia gigantia (19) with its huge trunk three feet thick 
and arms twenty to thirty feet long, or to the barrel shaped Ferocactus 
wislizeni 91 which grows ten feet tall and weighs half a ton. These can go 
five years without a rainfall. 
WHERE DO CACTI GROW ? 
As we have said before cacti are indigenous to North and South America 
and the adjacent islands, there is one exception, a certain Rhipsalis, found 
in Ceylon but never found in the Americas. Cacti grow from below sea-level 
in Death Valley, California to an altitude of eighteen thousand feet in the 
“Andes Mountains of South America. They grow from Terra del Fuego to 
Alaska and in areas where rain seldom or never falls, in the jungles of Panama 
where five inches of rain fell in two and one half minutes for a measured 
world’s record. They also grow where it rains nearly every day in Brazil. 
Cacti grow near Yuma, the hottest part of the United States and also in 
Minnesota where the temperature has registered fifty degrees below zero. This 
is a temperature range of nearly two hundred degrees. They grow in all kinds 
of soil. The Ariocarpus fissuratus (29) can be found growing on limestone 
ridges where there is absolutely nothing but lime dust between the rocks, we 
have gathered cacti in Panama where the soil is so rich that it takes one man 
working hard all day and every day to keep a trail three feet wide, cut only one 
mile through the jungle. 
To sum this up, cacti grow in every degree of heat and cold, every degree 
of latitude where there is soil for a foothold every degree of altitude and in 
any kind of soil or any kind of weather. 
We mentioned a certain Rhipsalis which grows in the East Indies as an 
epiphyte, clinging to the bark of trees like mistletoe. This little cactus grows 
like a bunch of small white candles, one-half inch long and one-sixteenth inch 
in diameter, one attached to another. 
Of the 1500 species, over 500 species are native of Mexico and 176 species 
are known to grow in the United States and several species grow in Canada and 
one species in Alaska. Texas, due to its great size and length, has 98 species, 
Arizona 72, New Mexico 67, California 41, Oklahoma 18. These figures are 
derived at by adding the species recognized by Britton & Rose, Cactaceae; 
Texas Cacti by Quillin; California Cactus by E. M. Baxter, Wooten, Cacti of 
New Mexico and Dr. Houghton’s Book on Cacti. 
Also through conversation and correspondence with such men as Gates, 
Hester, Eller, Thornber, Rose, Radley, (21) Bradbury, Fletcher, Potter, Teg- 
gleberg, Benedict, Poindexter, Gibson, Whitehead (22) and others, we believe 
that the above totals are short, as we have some twelve species which we have 
not been able to identify all from Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Cacti have 
been reported found growing in every state of the United States except Rhode 

15 Cacti growing on rocky hillside. 18 Giant Crest near Tucson, Arizona. 
16 Cactus Garden Boyce Thompson Arbor. 19 ‘siant Forest in Arizona. 
17 Opuntia opuntia near Fostoria Ohio. 20 Collecting Opuntia fulgida pods. 
