Capitolo 54
except in America. The family was developed there, and, thin to man
transplants him/it, not succeeded never in to earn elsewhere a sure position.
Essentially tropical in type, you/he/she was offered without he/she wants to say of
dispersing his/her seeds through the enormous expanse of ocean that interposes him
what it separated his/her habitat from the continents of sister.
But because cactuses are universally so almost prickly? From the grotesque one
the small melon-cactuses of our greenhouses English to the enormous and deprived one of grace
you show that form miles of hedgerows on Jamaican slant, the
members of this family of desert are separate above all from them
backbone abundant and thorns, or from the hair irritating street which you/they break
in Your skin if you happen to imprudently brush against them. Cactus
it is the curls of the vegetable world; their witticism is _Nemo me
impune lacessit_. A lot of one time in Western Indies I have pushed the hand
for a second in some entangled 'bush', as the negroes calls him/it, to
you grab of the rare flower or of the beautiful bug, and state punished for
twenty-four hours later from the stings of the almost invisible and
glass-as few the cactus-needles. When you rub them to them they only storm
pieces, and every piece inflicts a fresh wound on the meat where it
it burns. Some of the kind they have the great ones strong thorns,; some have
hair's clusters distances irritants measured; and some rejoice in
both immediately means of defense, impartially sprinkled on them whole
surface. In the prickly pear, the bundles of thorns are systematized,
geometrically with great regularity in a perfect quincunx. But that is
a small consolation indeed to the reflexive mind when you have stung
You badly with them.
The reason for this warlike disposition from the cactuses
it is tolerably an easy to guess. Forage is rare in the desert. The
hungry herbivores on which are found slow at times
the confinements of so thirsty regions would grab with avarice on some
juicy plant that suffered he/she offered them food and drink in theirs last