114 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 



CHAPTER IV. 



SALUBRITY. 



86. Healthy Growth. In the preceding chapter, proof 

 was furnished that the climate of the coast of California is 

 more equable, and more favorable to human growth and com- 

 fort, than that of Italy, Greece, or Palestine, countries 

 which have had the repute from remote times, of having the 

 most auspicious skies in the old world. In the chapter on 

 agriculture and botany, we shall see that the domestic animals 

 and cultivated plants grow with a rapidity, and the fruit 

 trees, cereals, and kitchen vegetables, bear with a fecundity, 

 unsurpassed and probably unequaled in any other part of the 

 world. In my researches I have not been able to learn of 

 crops elsewhere so large as many recorded in California. 



The Spanish Californians, before the American conquest, had 

 remarkably large families, and were long-lived beyond ex- 

 ample. In no place known to me were there so many centen- 

 arians relatively. Prominent among the early settlers were 

 Ignacio Vallejo, Joaquin Carrillo, .Jose Noriega, Jose Ar- 

 giiello, Jose Maria Pico. Francisco Sepulveda, Jose Maria 

 Ortega, and Juan Bandini. These men had eleven children 

 each on an average, the largest number in one family being 

 thirteen and the smallest nine. Two children of Ignacio Val- 

 lejo had each a dozen, and one grandchild has had a dozen 

 children. Jose Antonio Castro had twenty-five. It was a 

 common event for persons to have several hundred living de- 

 scendants. Juana Cota had five hundred, and Senora Domin- 



