OTHER RESOURCES 51 



forests for the production of wattle bark for tanning, 

 camphor forests for gum camphor, various eucalypts 

 for hardwood as the native timber is practically all 

 soft, but no considerable enterprise has resulted. 

 This is chiefly because possible profit is necessarily re- 

 mote and because the labor and water which such 

 undertakings would require have always been too 

 high priced to warrant entrance upon them. The 

 only exception to such caution and conservatism 

 was the boom in eucalyptus worked up by land specu- 

 lators about 1905, in the course of which consider- 

 able losses were incurred by investors who allowed 

 themselves to be persuaded that eucalypts required 

 neither good land nor moisture supply to make prof- 

 itable growth. In this way the eucalypts, which are, 

 when properly placed, the most profitable and satis- 

 factory timber trees ever introduced into California, 

 were afflicted with a bad name through no fault of 

 their own. 



A concrete relation of the mountain forests to the 

 foothill and valley development and prosperity lies 

 in the service of these vast forested areas to the crea- 

 tion of power and supply of water for irrigation of 

 rural, and for domestic and industrial uses of urban 

 communities, in the valleys and along the coast re- 

 gions where gravity transports at. If one will follow 

 the outlines of the topography of California, as given 

 in Chapter I and Plate I, it will immediately be 

 suggested that California is singularly a unit in nat- 

 ural water storage and stream flow. The snow falls 

 on the forested mountains and the streams from its 



