The flowers of cacti are generally large and showy and are quite responsive to light in their opening and closing. They have many stamens, from thirty or fifty to as many as three thousand in the Giant Cactus. This development of stamens is rare among flowering plants, and is due to a splitting process that takes place early in the development of the stamens of the embryo flower. The stamens of many cacti are sensitive to touch and when being worked by insects for pollen are constantly moving backward and forward. Cactus flowers differ also from nearly all other flowers in the number of sepals and petals, which is variable and relatively large, and in the fact that their sepals and petals are not distinct in character. Rather there is a gradual transition between the bracts of the ovary, if such are present, and the sepals; and likewise a gradual gradation in form, color, and size between the sepals and petals. There are usually several whorls or circles of petals in the flower; commonly such flowers are spoken of as being double. CHAPTER III THE BABY CACTUS Out in the vast desert land in ages long gone by, the stifling sun had burned everything to a cinder. This seeming annihilation was but part of that great plan wherein the desert regions of the earth have been transformed into the greatest flower garden of all creation; where Time has chiseled out the filigree of lacework and pattern for the hills and valleys; where erosion has painted the beautiful pictures on the faces of mountains and hills; where volcanic action has juggled the rocks and mountain sides into fantastic shapes and designs, piling them up and leveling them out again for ages untold, until the Divine decree was accomplished. For God has walked amidst all this seeming turbulence, and with infinite patience has brought forth verdure and flowers the like of which do not exist anywhere else on earth; and to-day when Man ventures into the great arid wastes it would seem that he little anticipates the hidden loveliness to be found there—the wonder of desert creations, flowers and then more flowers, blossoms of rare and seductive beauty, of exotic and sensuous fragrance. Flowers that cannot be painted by brush or in coloring to do justice to the delicate waxlike originals. Flowers that seem like delicate souls wrapped in somber lifeless bodies, trying to gain expression through their beautiful colorings and evanescent perfume in the dry atmosphere of their monotonous existence, out in the great stillness of the arid spaces with only the midnight blue of the heavens to caress them, and the dew of the night zephyrs to kiss them when the torrid sun has gone.