plateaus of southern Peru, near the limit of vegetation, therefore about 14,000 feet high, the wanderer is surprised by peculiar shapes of a yellowish-red color, which at a distance look like reposing savages, but which a closer inspection reveals to be shapeless heaps of low cacti, closely beset with yellowish-red spines. What Nature has withheld, however, in external aspect, she has, in most, richly replaced in the magnificent blossom. We are astonished to find the deformed gray-green mass of the Mamillaria decked with the most beautiful purple-red flowers. Strange is the contrast between the wretched and gloomy aspect of the naked, dry stem of the large-flowered torch-thistle (Cereus grandiflorus), and its large, splendid, Isabel-colored,[8] vanilla-scented, flowers, which, unfolding under cover of the silent night, beam like suns, and in the wonderful sporting of their stamens, seem almost to strive toward a higher--an animal life. But it is not the beauty of the blossom alone which gladdens us, not the refreshing sap alone that revives the languishing traveler. The economic uses are also manifold. Almost all the cacti bear edible fruit, and a portion of them are among the most delightful refreshments of the hot zones which ripen them. Almost all the Opuntias, known by the name of Indian figs, furnish, in the West Indies and Mexico, a favorite dessert fruit, and even the little rose-red berries of the Mamillarias, which with us are tasteless, have, beneath the tropics, a pleasant, acidulated, sweet juice. We may say, in general terms, that their fruit is a nobler form of our native gooseberry and currant, to which also they are the nearest allies in a botanical point of view. Succulent as is the stem of most of the cacti, yet, in the course of time, they perfect in it a wood as firm as it is light. This is especially the case in the tall columnar species of cereus, the old dead stems of which, after the decay of the gray-green rind, remain erect, their white wood standing ghost-like among the living stems, till a benighted traveler seizes it in that scantily wooded region, to make a fire to protect him from the mosquitoes, to bake his maize-cake, or burns it as a torch to light up the dark tropical night. It is from the last use that they have obtained the name of torch-thistles. These stems, on account of their lightness, are carried up on mules to the heights of the Cordilleras, to serve as beams, posts, and door-sills in the houses; as, for instance, in the mayoral of Antisana, perhaps the highest inhabited spot in the world (12,604 feet). Just as their allies, the gooseberry bushes, are used by our country people to form hedges to their gardens, are the Opuntias in Mexico, on the west coast of South America and in the southern part of Europe, and with greater success in the Canaries; their firm, shapeless branches soon interweave themselves into an impenetrable barrier, opposing,