Everything about these plants is wonderful. With the exception of the genus Peireskia, no plant of the order possesses leaves. Those parts of Cactus alatus, and the Indian fig, which are commonly called leaves, are nothing but flattened expansions of the stem. On the other hand, they are all distinguished by an extraordinarily fleshy stem, which, clothed by a grayish-green, leathery cuticle, and beset, in the places where leaves are situated in regular plants, with various tufts of hair, spines, and points, gives by its very varied degrees of development the varied character of the plants. The torch-thistles rise in form of nine-angled or often round columns to a height of thirty or forty feet, mostly branchless, but sometimes ramifying in the strangest ways, and looking like candelabra; the Indian figs are more humble; their oval, flat branches, arranged upon one another on all sides, produce special forms. The lowest and thickest torch-thistles connect themselves with hedgehog and melon-cacti, with their projecting ribs, and thus lead us to the almost perfectly globular Mamillarias, which are covered very regularly with fleshy warts of various heights. Finally, there are forms in which the growth in the longitudinal direction prevails, which with long, thin, often whip-like stems, like those of the serpent-cactus, hang down from the trees upon which they live as parasites. Few families have so limited a range of distribution upon the globe. All the species of cactus, perhaps without a single exception, are indigenous in America, between the parallels of 40° S. lat. and 40° N. lat. But some of them were so rapidly distributed through the Old World directly after the discovery of America, that they may almost be looked upon as fully naturalized there. Almost all delight in a dry situation, exposed to the burning rays of the sun, which contrasts strangely with their fleshy tissue, tumid with watery and not unpleasantly flavored with acid juice. This peculiarity gives them inestimable value to the fainting traveler, and Bernardin de St. Pierre has aptly called them the “Springs of the Desert.” The wild ass of the llanos, too, knows well how to avail himself of these plants. In the dry season, when all animal life flees from the glowing pampas, when cayman and boa sink into death-like sleep in the dried-up mud, the wild ass alone, traversing the steppe, knows how to guard against thirst; cautiously stripping off the dangerous spines of the Melocactus with his hoof, and then in safety sucking the cooling vegetable juice. In vertical extension, the cacti are not confined within such narrow limits, and they stretch from the lowest tracts along the coast, through the vast plains, up to the highest ridges of the Andes chain. On the shore of Lake Titicaca, 12,700 feet above the level of the sea, are seen the tall-stemmed Peireskias with their splendid deep brown-red blossoms, and on the