STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 325 



tomed to think of California as only a gold-bearing State that we can hardly 

 realize the fact that, in the production of wheat for export, she is the 

 equal of States which export almost nothing else. Twenty years ago who 

 would have believed that to-day her production of wine, silk, wool and 

 breadstuffs would entirely eclipse her products of gold ; and who would 

 believe me if I should to-da}' predict that, in far less than twenty years 

 from this time, the manufactures of San Francisco will exceed the pro- 

 ducts of California gold ? In the department of small fruits, how real 

 and varied does the producing capacity of the State become to our minds 

 when we consider that the importation of lemons, oranges, figs, limes, 

 olives, shelled and dried fruits into the United States, annually, amounts 

 to ten millions of dollars, and that each one of these articles can be 

 grown with ease in California. How actual and real becomes that beau- 

 tiful source of wealth, the silk culture, when we find that at the State 

 Fair, just held at Sacramento, there were exhibited samples of more than 

 four millions of cocoons which have been produced here, and of over a 

 hundred thousand mulberry trees growing in California. Here is the 

 infancy of a culture which has enriched China, Japan and Italy by mill- 

 ions of dollars annually. The importation of silks annually from those 

 lands into the United States swells to a sum which would hardly be 

 believed if I should state it here; but I may say that every year we 

 send away cargoes of silver dollars to pay for silks grown on foreign soil 

 and consumed in our country. California promises to assisr, ere long, in 

 checking that drain upon the wealth of the nation. 



The tea culture in this State, formerly considered a vision, has become 

 real, by the purchase of two thousand acres o/land in El Dorado County 

 by a party of Japanese, who are now occupied there in rearing the tea 

 plant. How vivid the wheat culture of the State becomes to the mind's 

 eye, from the single fact stated in the Alta California that, on the first 

 day of August, fifty thousand tons of wheat, in sacks, waiting for ship- 

 ment, were stretched along the banks of the Sacramento Kiver, in the 

 Counties of Tehama, Butte, Sutter, Colusa and Yolo, and that sixty thou- 

 sand tons more were to follow them, making one hundred and ten thousand 

 tons of wheat as the yield of five counties. Observe, also, that five years 

 ago the land from Yolo to Vallejo — fifty-six miles — was unproductive and 

 almost uninhabited. Now it is an almost continuous wheat field. A 

 railroad company has laid its track through that route, and is sending 

 two wheat trains per day, one every night, and extra trains on Sunday. 

 For miles along the track the wheat is piled up in sacks, waiting for 

 shipment, and more than forty thousand tons have been shipped this 

 year from Vallejo direct to Liverpool. Note also the fact that a million 

 and a half of orange and lemon trees are to be set out this year, by one 

 fruit association, upon a farm of six thousand acres, in the County of 

 San Bernardino, and that the same farm is adapted to the fig, olive, 

 banana, grape, pine apple, almond, filbert, walnut, chestnut and cocoanut. 

 Here is a fact of the greatest significance, as showing the varied capa- 

 city of the State for producing in that department of culture, wdiich we 

 consider as but collateral and secondary to the great staples. 



THE CHICO FAIR GROUNDS. 



But we need not look so far away. Here, upon these fair grounds, 

 to-day, there has been an exhibition of stock which shows that the 

 farmers of California have an ambition that will stop at nothing short 

 of perfection, and that is a kind of insurance effected upon the agricul- 



