The generic name is from the Greek word meaning sage; and the specific name, signifying cuplike, refers to the shape of the blossoms.

The dwellers among our southern mountains, with that happy instinct possessed by those who live close to the heart of nature, have aptly named this "pitcher-sage."

[PITCHER-SAGE—Sphacele calycina.]

After the flowers have passed away, the large inflated, light-green calyxes, densely crowded upon the stems, become quite conspicuous.

YUCCA-PALM. TREE-YUCCA. JOSHUA-TREE.

Yucca arborescens, Trelease. Lily Family.

Scraggly trees; thirty, or forty feet high; with trunks one or two feet in diameter. Leaves.—Eight inches long; crowded; rigid; spine-tipped; serrulate; the older ones reflexed and sun-bleached, the younger ashy-green. Flowers.—In sessile, ovate panicles, terminating the branches. Panicles several inches long. Perianth.—Narrowly campanulate; eighteen to thirty lines long. Fruit.—Two or three inches long. (Otherwise as Y. Mohavensis.) Hab.—Southwestern Utah to the Mojave Desert.

The traveler crossing the Mojave Desert upon the railroad has his curiosity violently aroused by certain fantastic tree forms that whirl by the car windows. These are the curious Joshua-trees of the Mormons, which are called in California tree-yucca or yucca-palm. A writer in "The Land of Sunshine" thus aptly characterizes them: "Weird, twisted, demoniacal, the yuccas remind me of those enchanted forests described by Dante, whose trees were human creatures in torment. In twisted groups or standing isolated, they may readily be imagined specters of the plains."

Mr. Sargent tells us that, though found much to the eastward of our borders, it abounds in the Mojave Desert, where it attains its largest size and forms a belt of gaunt, straggling forest several miles in width along the desert's western rim.