Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/359

Rh The months of November and December, 1875, were spent in southwestern Utah, where he made a collection of the principal plants and the plant products of the Paiutes. An account by Dr. Palmer of "Indian Food Customs" was afterwards published in Volume 12 of the American Naturalist, and reprinted in the American Journal of Pharmacy in 1878. Several burial mounds in the vicinity were opened by Dr. Palmer, and a valuable collection of pottery, beads, etc., resembling similar objects of Pima and Hopi Indians of Arizona, was made and sent to the National Museum.

From St. George, Utah, Dr. Palmer went to San Bernardino, California, for necessary supplies, and then back to Arizona, where he visited the Mohave Indians of the Colorado Kiver, concerning whose arts and customs he obtained valuable notes, describing their methods of fishing, trapping, pottery-making, food preparing, their navigation on balsas made of bundles of reeds and their primitive methods of agriculture. He also collected a number of living cactaceae characteristic of the vegetation of the region, including the giant Cereus, for exhibition at Philadelphia.

From Camp Mohave he crossed the desert to San Bernardino, discovering on the way a beautiful little plant which proved to be the type of a new genus of the poppy family, and to which Professor Gray gave the name Canbya.

On May 29, accompanied by Dr. Parry, Professor Lemmon and Mr. Craft, of Crafton, and several others. Dr. Palmer set out to climb Mount San Bernardino. The next day Dr. Palmer fell from his horse and severely injured his spine. He was obliged to lie until the following day on an improvised bed, when he was carried to the bottom of the mountain to a carriage in which Dr. and Mrs. Parry had come to take him home. In the meantime an account of the expedition had been published at San Bernardino, in which it was stated that the doctor had been left "on the mountain without grass or water, with a man to look after him." "Wherever I went for some time afterward," said Dr. Palmer, "I was pointed out as the man who had been left on Grayback Mountain without grass or water; sometimes I was jocosely addressed: 'Hello, old grass-and-water, how's your back?'"

Dr. Palmer next visited the region surrounding San Luis Obispo, California, where he secured several new species, and thence he returned with Dr. Parry and Mrs. Parry to their home in Davenport, Iowa.

In December, 1876, he returned once more to the vicinity of St. George, Utah, this time for the purpose of making archeological explorations for the Peabody Museum of Harvard University. Accounts of the discovery of remarkable tablets bearing signs of the zodiac, conventional figures of the planets, etc., had been recently published, and