AGRICULTURE. 291 



and of exporting several million pounds of the wool, we have 

 not exported so much as the imported animals should have pro- 

 duced : we have only about three hundred animals that deserve 

 to be called Angora goats. There are 18,000 grade goats 

 crossed with the common stock ; but so far as experience has 

 as yet determined, they are worthless for wool. Whether the 

 Angora goats can be bred with a profit in California, is still 

 a problem. They will live and multiply in some places where 

 sheep will not. Thus, in the Sierra Nevada there is a strip 

 twenty miles wide between 500 and 5,000 feet above the sea, 

 where, on account of the abundance of brush, sheep will not 

 thrive. The Cashmere goats prefer browsing to grazing, and 

 they eat the foliage of all the bushes except the poison oak, 

 standing upon their hind feet to reach as far as possible on the 

 chaparral and manzanita. The goats keep together and come 

 home at night ; and it is said that one man can herd 2,000 

 of them with less trouble than two men can herd 2,000 sheep. 

 They have no disease except that a few have been poisoned 

 it is supposed by eating dry buckeyes. 



213. Poultry. Poultry command very high prices in this 

 State, but all attempts to breed them on a large scale have 

 proved unprofitable. Hens are worth from fifty to seventy- 

 five cents each, and eggs from twenty-five to fifty cents per 

 dozen. Chickens are healthy and increase rapidly in small 

 poultry-yards or farms ; but when more than five hundred are 

 collected a fatal epidemic appears, and they die off. The dis- 

 ease seems to be a kind of apoplexy, for it attacks the fattest 

 chickens, and they die suddenly. Several large henneries have 

 been established, but all have failed ; that is, so far as their 

 purpose was the production of eggs and chickens for the table 

 with a profit. 



214. Bees. It was supposed, before 1853, that the honey- 

 bee would not thrive in a climate so dry as that of California ; 

 but some hives brought to the State in that year, proved the 

 error of the supposition. A good hive will increase in num- 



