In its material aspects it is equally full of contrasts. Here are the greatest deserts and waste places in America, and side by side with them, often with no more than a few strands of barbed wire to mark the division-line, are the richest farming-lands in America, lands more fertile, even, than the famed corn-fields of Illinois or the fruit-orchards of Michigan. The Southwest has been denominated, with reason, the treeless land, and yet it contains to-day the largest unbroken stretches of forest in the country, there being nothing to equal the timber-lands of the Colorado plateau in northern and central Arizona. No part of the United States possesses such an extent of grass-plain, Texas being the greatest of the plain States, and yet none has grander mountains. Only three States have higher peaks than the noble Sierra Blanca of New Mexico, fourteen thousand two hundred and sixty-nine feet in altitude, and there are few more magnificent elevations than San Francisco Mountain in Arizona. Though the region, to the hurried railroad traveler, seems barren and desolate almost beyond comparison, it is yet richer in variety, if not in luxury, of vegetation than any other part of the country. Professor Merriam found many arctic types in the flora of the upper regions of the San Francisco Mountain. Within a radius of a few hundred miles grow the pines and firs found in northern Canada, and the figs and dates of the African semi-tropics; Southern oranges and olives grow side by side with Northern wheat; the cactus and the fir are often found within sight of each other. Nowhere are there so many strange and marvelous forms of life as here--of flowers, multitudinous cacti and the palms; of animals, the Gila monster, the horned toad, the hydrophobia skunk, and many other unique species. Besides the monotonous desert, with its apparent lack of interest to the traveler, the region contains the greatest natural wonder on the continent--the Grand Cañon of the Colorado River. It also possesses unnumbered other natural phenomena and some of the grandest mountain and forest scenery. With all its lack of rain, it is watered by two of the great rivers of the continent--the Colorado and the Rio Grande.