THE RESOURCES AND CLIMATE OF CALIFORNIA. 109 
without stretching far enough northward to know the severity 
of winter, or diri enough southward to feel the enervatiug 
influence of a tropical sun. 
It could supply all its own wants. Its pastoral pun 
could easily furnish wool, hides and food for twenty times 
its present population. Its rivers and bays swarm with the 
choicest of fish, salmon being so abundant that it can hardly 
be accounted a luxury. The vine-bearing capacity of the 
one county of Sonoma exceeds that of all the wine-growing 
regions of Europe. Wheat has been harvested at the rate 
of ninety bushels to the acre, and fifty or sixty bushels are 
but an ordinary crop, twenty being regarded as a good yiel 
in the Genesee district of New York. The fruits are un- 
surpassed in quality and in profusion, and are subject to 
. none of the blights, parasitic insects and fungi, that infest 
our orchards, so that one need not fear to eat an apple 
in the dark. Strawberries may be bought in the San Fran- 
cisco market every month in the year. It is not easy to 
name any fruit which will not ripen within the limits of the 
State. At Sonoma, on the grounds of General Vallejo, the 
old Spanish commandant of California, I saw ripe or ripen- 
ing, along with all the common fruits of the temperate zone, 
oranges, lemons, bananas, olives, figs and almonds. I have 
eaten olives in Italy, but never any so good as those from the 
General's own trees on which I lunched at his table. In the 
southern part of the State, cotton is rapidly becoming a sta- 
ple, and coffee, equal to the best St. Domingo, is already 
raised. The cultivation of tea has been commenced with 
the promise of complete success, and there is no reason why 
the spices of the East Indies should not become naturalized 
there. 
There is also in the iioi a supply of lumber of all 
kinds which it would take many centuries to exhaust, though 
as yet, for lack of available avenues for transportation, lum- 
ber for the cities on the coast is imported from Oregon. 
If every sehooner, sloop and sail-boat in the world were a 
