IO Climatic Peculiarities. 
home in California, and are improved by the intelligent cultiva- 
tion and selection which here prevail. On the other hand, it 
has been abundantly demonstrated, during recent years, by 
official awards at great exhibitions and by the sharp criteria of 
the markets as weil, that the fruits of wintry regions are quite 
as much benefited by transfer to proper locations in California 
as are the people who come to grow them. From north and 
south alike, then, California maies grand acquisitions, and 
includes within her area the adaptations of the whole country, 
with some which no other State possesses. 
But while this horticultural scope is claimed for the State 
as a whole, it is necessary to add that local adaptations within 
the State must be very narrowly drawn. Our greatest failures 
have followed ill choice of location for the purpose intended. 
Whenever certain California fruits have been ill spoken of, they 
have been produced in the wrong places, or by ill-advised 
methods. It is possible, then, to produce both poor and perfect 
fruit of a given kind. It may be said this can be done anywhere 
by the extremes of culture and neglect, but to this proposition 
it must be added that in California equally excellent methods 
and care will produce perfection in one place and the opposite 
in another. One who seeks to know California well must under- 
take to master both its horticultural greatness and littleness; 
and so closely are these associated, and so narrow the belts of 
special adaptations, that there are many counties which have a 
range of products nearly as great as the State itself. 
It is hard for the stranger to realize this. It is difficult for 
him to believe that the terms “northern” and “southern” have 
almost no horticultural significance in California; that northern 
fruits reach perfection, under proper conditions, at the south, 
and vice versa; that some regions of greatest rainfall have to 
irrigate most frequently; that some of greatest heat have sharp- 
est valley frosts; that some fruits can be successfully grown 
through a north and south distance of 500 miles, but cannot be 
successfully carried a few hundred feet of either less or greater 
elevation; that on the same parailel of latitude within a hundred 
miles of distance, from coast to mountainside, one can contin- 
uously gather marketable Bartlett pears for three months—not 
to mention the second crop, which is often of account on the 
same trees in the same season. 
Through the multitude of local observations, which seem 
perplexing and almost contradictory, it is possible to clearly dis- 
cern certain general conditions of both nature and culture, which 
may be briefly advanced as characteristically and distinctively 
Californian. 
The climate of the Pacific Coast is described by the meteor- 
