420 Transactions of the 



expectation that can be entertained of their magnitude; but like the 

 trees they grow upon the imagination; they exalt and then fill it; they 

 expand upon the mental vision, and in the end leave one with an idea of 

 immensity, of an extension illimitable, exceeding even that that comes 

 to one on the bosom of old ocean. Then they grow in beauty as they 

 grow in proportions. An infinite variety of contour and of color devel- 

 ops itself in what was at first monotony. The plains are fascinating 

 with a fascination of their own, as luring as that of the ocean or the 

 mountains; and the traveler who has first been wearied with a tiresome 

 uniformity, and oppressed with the steady down-pour of Summer heat, 

 dazzled by the glare from the white skeletons of grasses or of more 

 gleaming stubble, comes to find that an infinite variety and beauty lurk 

 in the landscape; that to the hot noon, a cool eventide succeeds; that 

 there are compensations even for the glare that tries and tires the un- 

 accustomed eyes; and he ends by taking unto himself the soul and heart 

 of the plain's life, and finding a very exultation in its largeness and 

 freedom. 



A recent American writer described his passage by rail across Bavaria. 

 For more than two hundred miles of course, and on either hand, further 

 than the eye could reach, waved a sea of grain, unmarred by fence and 

 almost unmarked by hedge; the sheet of green seemed to him not only 

 a beautiful but a grand thing. He described it to his countrymen as 

 something almost worth going to Europe to see. In a little while the 

 traveler who shall visit California may write back to his friends of a 

 grander sea of goodlier growth, sweeping in one sheet across the vast 

 bosom of California, until it waves against the foothills of the Sierra on 

 the one hand, and runs its rippling line half way up the slopes of the 

 Diablo range on the other — more than sixty miles awa}^. How beauti- 

 ful and grand soever this sight may be, a finer thing will be the lesson 

 that it teaches — how all this goodliness and wealth have been wrought 

 by man's intelligence, and energy, and courage. It is he who will have 

 made the waste into a garden and the desert to bloom. To landscapes 

 as fair, Nature can point as the handiwork, but this one man shall claim 

 for his own. The time will at last have come when he was to apply in 

 California the art that had made of Babylon, China, India, Japan, 

 Mexico, and Peru, garden spots of earth. The nation youngest in birth 

 had tardily learnt the earliest lesson that the oldest had to teach; but 

 having learnt it, applies it with a decision and energy all her own. The 

 era of irrigation becomes the third great epoch in the history of Cali- 

 fornia, the point of her new departure upon a course that leads to a 

 development of strength. Titanic measured by that of her compeers, 

 and a wealth, imperial in its luxuriance. 



SOILS AND SUEFACES. 



SOILS OP THE CALIFORNIA PLAINS. 



Preliminary to any examination of the utility and detail of irrigation 

 in California, the character of the soils and of their surfaces must be 

 attentively considered. All our soils outside of the tule formation can 

 be divided into two classes — adobes and loams. In general, these are 

 clearly distinguished from each other, yet each passes by insensible de- 

 grees into the other. The amount of area intermediate between adobe 

 and loam is however so small as to be unimportant. The adobes, which. 



