olO TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 



■warm that mj writing table I have fronting the door, which is 

 wide open. You speak of the many new varieties of the 

 grape, pear, apple and straAvberry of great merit and decided 

 improvements, and yon wish this may go on till our very hill 

 tops are covered with the choisest of fruits. 



"I am sorry to say that this part of California cannot avail 

 itself of such benefits. Although our very hill tops, so far as I 

 have seen, are throughout' the year covered with evergreen trees 

 and bushes, and in a month more will be carpeted with the most 

 beautiful flowers, the soil being rich and presenting no impedi- 

 ment to cultivation, but unless some new and cheap system of 

 hydraulics, whereby plants and trees not native to the soil can 

 be irrigated during the long drouth of summer, till then our 

 mountains must remain barren of plants other than those native 

 to its soil. 



"My present attempt at horticulture has been greatly facilitated 

 by being enabled to purchase a great many choice bearing fruit 

 trees that were swept by the torrent from the gardens of our near 

 neighbors, and caught some distance below a lot of grape vines. 

 I have yet no help, for love or money, except occasionally a 

 Wally Indian, and they will work but a few hours at a time. 

 But, as my horticultural experiments are only for the benefit of 

 my own family, a failure to produce much will affect them only. 

 From the heat I experienced last summer, I thought [ would be 

 able to raise tropical fruits out of doors, and I planted Sicily 

 orange seed and choice lemon, which one of my daugters sent 

 me from New York. But the amount of frost, snow and ice, 

 an inch in thichness, taught me the impossibility of doing so. 



"The oranges and lemons are prospering finely, in boxes in-doors; 

 but, for ten months of the year, they would be perfectly safe out 

 of doors. I will most gladly furnish to the Farmers' Club such 

 rare seeds and bulbs as I can obtain with their qualities and 

 uses, but will have to defer doing so till fresh seed can be 

 obtained in the summer or autumn. It was in contemplation by 

 the Institute to have a cabinet of useful and curious mineral 

 and vegetable productions, in fact, a cabinet of natural history- 

 If this idea has not been abandoned, I think I might be enabled to 

 furnish quite an interesting addition thereto. The famed Yose- 

 mite falls and mammoth trees I have not yet visited, although 

 no more than fifteen miles in a bee line from here ; I contemplate 

 doinp' so the incoming summer, when I hope to be able to obtain ■ 



