Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/228

216 shrubs and dwarf trees of the far East, which are sure to find sooner or later a warm welcome among us.

X. —Next to the food-plants for man, there is no single class of commercial plants of greater interest than the food-plants for flocks and herds. Forage plants, wild and cultivated, are among the most important and highly valued resources of vast areas. No single question is of more vital consequence to our farthest West and Southwest.

It so happens that the plants on which the pastoralist relies grow or are grown on soil of inferior value to the agriculturist. Even soil which is almost sterile may possess vegetation on which flocks and herds may graze; and, further, these animals may thrive in districts where the vegetation appears at first sight too scanty or too forbidding even to support life. There are immense districts in parts of the Australian continent where flocks are kept on plants so dry and desert-like that an inexperienced person would pass them by as not fit for his sheep, and yet, as Mr. Samuel Dixon has well shown, these plants are of high nutritive value and are attractive to flocks.

Relegatiug to the notes to be published with this address brief descriptions of a few of the fodder-plants suggested for use in dry districts, I shall now mention the salt-bushes of various sorts, and the allied desert plants of Australia, as worth a careful trial on some of our very dry regions in the farthest West. There are numerous other excellent fodder-plants adapted to dry but not parched areas which can be brought in from the corresponding districts of the southern hemisphere and from the East.

At an earlier stage of this address I have had occasion to refer to Baron von Mueller, whose efforts looking toward the