Untitled - The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

ON THE PACIFIC COAST 337
them songsters, and all of them more pleasantly garrulous than
any similar assemblage of little birds I have met with elsewhere
in the world. The flowers are followed by pendulous, flattish,
yellow pods, 6 to 8 inches long, about a finger's breadth and half
as thick, containing several thin flat seeds, immersed in a
sweetish mucilaginous compactly spongy but brittle substance,
which is the nutritive part. These pods are greedily devoured
by horses, cows, and goats, but especially by asses, which are
more numerous than any other domestic animals. It is a very
concentrated and heating kind of food, and I have seen horses
after eating it chew the leaves of the castor-oil plant, or any kind
of rubbish, to counteract its . . .
stimulating properties.
The Algarrobo secretes an inflammable gum -resin, which
exudes from cracks in the bark and coagulates into a blackish
mass. Advantage is taken of it to prostrate the trees by fire,
when it is required to clear the ground for cultivation. Cutting
them down is scarcely ever resorted to, the timber being so hard
as soon to render useless the best-tempered axe. The method
employed A
is this :
truncheon of wood, alight at one end, is
laid on the ground with that end touching the tree to windward.
The trunk soon takes fire, and (especially if the wind be strong)
is in a few hours burnt right through nearly horizontally, the part
destroyed rarely exceeding from half a foot to a foot in breadth ;
and being thus prostrated, its still burning end is covered with
earth to extinguish the fire. There is no better material for fuel
than Algarrobo wood, and its very great hardness and durability
would make it a most desirable timber for any kind of con-
struction, were it not that it grows so crooked and is so intractable
to work.
Potreros from which animals have been long excluded
sometimes grow so thick, from two kinds of lianas which fill up
the intervals of the trees, as to be impassable. A species of
Rhamnus, called Lipe, armed with formidable decussate spines,
and producing minute 4-5-merous ilowers, followed by small edible
black berries, supports itself against the Algarrobos and climbs
alone and has
high among their branches. When it grows
room to it spread, forms large round bushes, each mam \.
in diameter, and 12 to 15 feet high. Bushes of Lipe, scattered
over the bare ground, look at a distance not unlike the small
groves of hollies or other evergreens that stud the sanded or
gravelled surface of an English shrubbery. In these bushes hide
r
by da) numerous foxes, which come out by night in
t
ol fund.
They are as fond of melons as .Fsop's fox was of grapes, and do not
despise them even when green, so they can get at them. Li/ards
and a few snakes also seek the shelter of the Lipe. Flock - ol
small birds roost there by night, and by day pick the berries.
The companion of the Lipe is a rampant Xyctaginea (Crypio-
VOL. II