232 TRANSACTIONS OP THE 



[Mr. Pixley here spoke at length upon the science of agriculture 

 as practiced in Egypt under the Ptolemies, showing that they knew 

 much agricultural science, and also of irrigation.] 



Adam, I take it, was the first gentleman farmer who lived in the 

 country and enjoyed the luxury of a Summer resort, a place where 

 he took his wife, our good old mother Eve, to spend the honeymoon 

 of their early creation, and where their first babies were born, and 

 where the children had the full benefit of open air exercises. I 

 think it is nowhere remarked that Adam had any special knowledge 

 of farm work, and as I understand, the place upon which he lived 

 was rather a fancy fruit farm than a ranch for general cultivation. 



In that primitive time there was not so very great a necessity for 

 labor as now. There were not so many artificial wants to be sup- 

 plied. If labor was brought into the world as a penalty for sin, while 

 I would not be impolite enough to blame a lady, and she the first 

 lady and in fact the only lady of her time, for eating the forbidden 

 apple under the temptation of the serpent, I wish there had been no 

 apples in the Eden farm, and I sincerely wish there had been no 

 sycophantic, crawling devil to have tempted her. Out of this temp- 

 tation and fall came all the trooping curse of artificial wants. 



I can conceive of no more delightful position on earth than to be 

 the owner in fee simple, without mortgage or taxes, of a thoroughly 

 irrigated farm on the banks of the Euphrates, or the San Joaquin or 

 Stanislaus, or any other nice stream, where the soil is so rich that it 

 would produce crops without labor, growung vines without the phy- 

 loxera, raise wheat without rust, or lodgment or wevil, and fruit 

 without effort; where one's wife had no excuse to vex- with milliner's 

 bills, or had any necessity for expensively fine clothes; where one's 

 boys had no temptation from any girls nearer than the land of Nod 

 to lead them into the vanities of claw hammer coats and kid gloves; 

 where there were no ladies' seminaries to create a demand for pianos 

 and a taste for novel reading. 



* ^ * -fi * * * * 



The capacity of a country like this valley of the San Joaquin is 

 absolutely unlimited if it was cultivated as in ancient times was 

 the soil of the countries to which I have referred. _ Egypt, Italy, 

 Spain, were not unlike this valley; they all demanded irrigation, and 

 they all attained their' highest prosperity when irrigation and cul- 

 tivation reached their highest development. The countries that 

 to-day are producing the greatest results are those where irrigation 

 is in demand, as India and the plains of Lombardy, where artificial 

 appliances are brought forward to aid nature, as in the reclamation 

 of lands in Holland, not unlike our reclamation of tule lands; but 

 this higher degree of development is only possible under conditions 

 which every single man in this audience will refuse to accept. Small 

 farms well cultivated; all the water taken from your river beds, all 

 the waste wealth of melting snows stored up in your mountains and 

 utilized by distribution through artificial pipes; all the dry lands 

 irrigated, and all the wet land reclaimed, and all cultivated to their 

 capacity, and this County of San Joaquin would support more people 

 than now live west of the Rocky Mountains, and would support 

 them with more ease, with less labor and more comfort, and give to 

 them more luxuries and social and intellectual enjoyments than the 

 average people of this State now enjoy. Your landscape would 

 become a picture of rural beauty; there would be a schoolmaster 



