Then, to repel the attacks of herbivores, who would gladly get
at the juicy morsel if they could, the foliage has been turned into
sharp defensive spines and prickles. The cactus is tenacious of life to
a wonderful degree; and for reproduction it trusts not merely to its
brilliant flowers, fertilised for the most part by desert moths or
butterflies, and to its juicy fruit, of which the common prickly pear is
a familiar instance, but it has the special property of springing afresh
from any stray bit or fragment of the stem that happens to fall upon the
dry ground anywhere.
True cactuses (in the native state) are confined to America; but the
unhappy naturalist who ventures to say so in mixed society is sure to
get sat upon (without due cause) by numberless people who have seen 'the
cactus' wild all the world over. For one thing, the prickly pear and a
few other common American species, have been naturalised and run wild
throughout North Africa, the Mediterranean shores, and a great part of
India, Arabia, and Persia. But what is more interesting and more
confusing still, other desert plants which are _not_ cactuses, living
in South Africa, Sind, Rajputana, and elsewhere unspecified, have been
driven by the nature of their circumstances and the dryness of the soil
to adopt precisely the same tactics, and therefore unconsciously to
mimic or imitate the cactus tribe in the minutest details of their
personal appearance. Most of these fallacious pseudo-cactuses are really
spurges or euphorbias by family.
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