was practically California, socially, politically, and financially.

About San Francisco there is a steady and brisk wind movement, flowing in through the narrow gap of the Golden Gate. In Southern California, while there is daily ebb and flow of air-currents (in the morning from off the sea, and at night down from the mountains), a real wind is very rare. Hurricanes and cyclones are absolutely unknown in the State. Despite the great heat of the deserts, and high mercury sometimes recorded in the valleys, the dryness of the atmosphere renders it harmless, and sunstroke is unknown. Seasonal diseases, typhoids, malarias, and pernicious fevers, summer diseases of children, gastric or hepatic diseases, are rare. Mean summer temperature San Francisco 60°; winter mean 51°; greatest daily range temper ature Los Angeles 29°, as against 69° for Boston. The modern migration to California has been largely attracted by this unique and hospitable climate, free from the dangerous heats of summer and the bitter winter cold of the regions east of the Rocky Mountains. In the inhabited portions of this State, extreme cold is unknown; while owing to rapid radiation, the summer nights are always so cool as to call for blankets. The fauna of California is peculiarly interesting, and includes considerably over 100 species of mammals, though the larger game varieties have in a half century been nearly exterminated. At the American occupation, elk were seen in droves of thousands. Great numbers were killed from the deck of steamers plying to Sacramento. Occupation of the State by Indians immemorially, and by Spaniards for nearly a century, had not appreciably diminished the wild animals; but the same wanton spirit which in a score of years exterminated tens of millions of the American bison on the great plains has in California made the great mammals nearly extinct. The grizzly bear, once in great abundance in all parts of the State, is now very scarce; the black, cinnamon, and brown bear are more common. Sea lions of a ton weight are still numerous along the coast, and their populous rookeries a few hundred feet from the cliff House in San Francisco are an object of interest to travelers. The California lion, mountain lion, or puma, is still not infrequent, and wildcats abound in the mountains. The coyote is common, and of utility in decimating the hordes of rabbits; though an ill-judged bounty on coyote scalps has of late years much reduced the numbers of this small wolf. The beaver, once in vast numbers here, is now confined to the remotest mountain streams; and the valuable sea otter is almost extinct. Black-tailed and mule deer are still reasonably frequent; but the antelope, which once roamed the northern and southern valleys in great bands, have hardly a representative left. The same is true of the mountain sheep (Ovis Ammon), once common in all the higher ranges. Spermophiles, or ground squirrels, and five species of gopher, are numerous and a great pest to the farmer. Jack rabbits and "cotton-tails" are abundant in all parts of the State, despite community "drives" in which sometimes tens of thousands are killed in a day. The birds of California number above 350 species. The largest winged creature in North America is the California condor. Quail of two species are in vast abundance throughout the State.

While the Pacific coast of North and South America in general is peculiarly liable to seismic disturbances, California had never experienced an earthquake of the first magnitude, nor anything approaching that of Charleston, S. C., in 1886; nor that of New Madrid, Mo., until those of April 1906, when San Francisco was devastated and a large portion of the city subsequently burned, with a property loss of over $200,000,000 and numerous lives and the surrounding cities and towns suffered severely. The severest shocks previous to this were in 1812, when 30 people were killed by the fall of a church tower in Capistrano; and that of 1872, when about a score perished in Owen's Valley.

River Systems. As in most arid States, the drainage of California is simple. For some 300 miles on its southeastern edge the State is bounded by the Colorado River, which rises in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and flows 1,360 miles to the Gulf of California. It has no tributaries whatever from California, all eastbound streams from the Sierra Nevada being lost in the desert. On the western coast, though a few rivers reach the sea (like the Klamath, Mad, Eel, and Salinas) they are relatively unimportant and incidental. The real drainage system of the State has outlet through San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate, by the two chief inland rivers which join about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. Both rise in the Sierra Nevada, the Sacramento (370 miles long) to the north, the San Joaquin (350 miles long) to the south. Their main course averages along nearly the median line north and south, through nearly two thirds the length of the State. They have no tributaries worthy of the name from the great westerly mountain wall, the Coast Range; their waters being fed almost exclusively from the vast Alpine chain which is in effect, though not politically, the eastern boundary of California down to latitude 35° 30". Their important feeders from the Sierra are the Feather, Yuba, Cosumnes, American, Mokelumne, Kern, Kings, etc. All these are fine mountain torrents, beloved of sportsmen, and flowing through magnificent scenery, but not of rank as waterways. The most important is the Feather, which has a large drainage area. Several streams in Southern California, like the Los Angeles, San Gabriel, and Santa Ana, reach the sea, but all are practically exhausted by irrigation uses, except during winter flood-water. The many streams from the abrupt eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada all disappear in alkaline "sinks," -like Pyramid Lake, Owen's Lake, Mono Lake, and Death Valley,- and never even in flood reach the ocean by their great natural conduit, the Colorado River. The lakes of California are not important as to navigation. Tulare Lake, receiving the drainage of the Kern, Kaweah, and Kings rivers, is 700 square miles in area, but only 40 feet deep. In very high water its overflow reaches the San Joaquin; but ordinarily its income of waters is cared for by evaporation. Lake Tahoe in the extreme north, at an elevation of 6,200 feet, is 20 miles long and 1,500 feet deep, and famous for the purity of its waters, the beauty of its scenery, and its trout. It is the largest of the glacial lakes, of which there are a great number in the Sierra, mostly at altitudes exceeding the highest mountain summits east of Colorado. The lower-lying

lakes of the State are mostly without outlet, and of various degrees of brackishness, culminating in the "sink" of the Amargosa River nearly 200 feet below sea-level on the eastern side of the range; where evaporation has left vast alkaline deposits, now of great commercial value.

Geology. The main axis of the Sierra Nevada is of granite throughout. To the north there are some metamorphic peaks, and many summits are capped with volcanic materials. Mt. Shasta in the far north is an extinct volcano (14.470 feet). So also is Lassen's Peak (10,577 feet). This granite core is flanked by a very heavy mass of slaty metamorphic rocks, mostly argillaceous, chloritic, and talcose slates, constituting the great auriferous belt of the Sierra. The Coast Range is made up almost entirely of cretaceous and tertiary marines, chiefly sandstones and bituminous shales. It is in this belt that the great recent development of petroleum has been made.

Besides the vast reaches of alluvial soils in the lower valleys, which were first attacked for agriculture, an enormous area of disintegrated granite gravels along the foothills and first acclivities has been found the most productive soil in the State, particularly with reference to valuable crops. These great gravel beds, which seem to the farmer from the black "bottoms" of Ohio the most unpromising of soils, are in reality rich in all the elements of plant food. The vast majority of the valuable orchards, particularly of Southern California, are planted upon this granitic detritus; and without exception the finest oranges and other citrus fruits come from this soil. The relative aridity of California, long supposed to be a curse, is now known to be a two-fold blessing. Exhaustive analyses, comparative with every portion of the Union, show these gravels to average much richer in chemical constituents than soils leached out by excessive rainfall. Furthermore, the fact that precipitation is not invariably sufficient to insure crops has compelled irrigation, which does insure them; so that farmers in the arid lands have much greater crop-certainty than those of regions with most abundant rainfall.

Agriculture.- In no item of its history has California been more unlike other States than in development and sequences of agriculture. The first (and for 60 years commercially chief) industry was cattle. derived from herds introduced from Mexico by Viceroy Galvez, 1769, and chief wealth of the Mission establishments and Spanish colonists. It was a generation after the American occupation before agriculture was seriously undertaken; and for another term of years it was chiefly a gigantic seasonal "gamble with the weather" in dry-farming of cereals. The characteristic features of agriculture up to about 1870 were enormous holdings, reckoned at least by tens of thousands of acres, with the single crop (almost exclusively wheat and barley) and purchase of every other article of necessity or luxury. On areas of hundreds of square miles apiece there were an individual or corporate owner, a single crop, a few hundred hirelings at the height of the season, and their temporary quarters. A few of these enormous ranchos still survive; and Miller and Lux still farm about 1,000,000

acres, with 20,000 acres in a single field. But within a generation the typical character of agriculture in California has radically changed. The greatest recorded drouth (1864) which not only destroyed grain but hundreds of thousands of cattle (60.000 head being sold that year in Santa Barbara at 371⁄2c. per head), exclusion of the Chinese, who had been the chief reliance for labor on the great ranchos, the fall in wheat, and other factors, led to the breaking up of these gigantic domains. A slight idea of the change may be had from the census fact that in 1850 the average size of all California farms was 4,456.6 acres; and in 1900, 397.4 acres. Along with this great dry-farm gambling-for such it was sheep became a leading industry in the State, particularly in Southern California.

Within about 25 years-that is, since 1685, -the general character of California farming has changed to small holdings, occupied not by tenants but by American owners, with families, with diversified crops, and obliged to purchase only the luxuries of life; with intensive methods and certainty (by irrigation) of crops. California has now more than one fourth of all the irrigators in the United States. The average size of irrigated farms is in Southern California 214 acres; in rest of State about 82 acres. The typical California farm under the modern régime is perhaps 10 acres; irrigated either by its own pumping plant or from a community ditch, and yielding an annual income of not less than $200 per

acre.

Perhaps the greatest single factor in bringing about this structural change was the orange. In 1862 there were 25,000 orange trees in the State, all seedlings, and deriving from Mexico, where the fruit was introduced by the Spaniards nearly three and a half centuries earlier. In 1873 two seedless orange trees from Brazil were sent from the Department of Agriculture in Washington to Riverside, California. From these two parent trees has sprung the modern orange industry of California — and practically of the United States; as Florida, the only other orange State in the Union, yielded in 1900 273.000 boxes of oranges to California's 5,882,000. Millions of trees from their buds are now bearing or growing in this State, and the hereditary fruit, seedless and delicious, leads the American market. This crop, highly remunerative, and practically continuous (shipments being made every month in the year) has been for these reasons, and aesthetic ones, a large attraction to high-class immigration, and an important factor in shaping agricultural methods. For development of the industry, see statistics below.

In deciduous fruits, total production, shipments fresh, canning and drying, California has within a generation come to lead the Union; as it leads in all tropical fruits.

California is first successful grower of sugar beets, and has by far the largest factories. In 1900 it had 37.4 per cent of acreage and 44.9 per cent of beet sugar product of the entire Union. The sensational achievements of Luther Burbank in hybridizing fruits for instance, the creation of a large plum without any pit whatever are already world-famous. Almost as remarkable results have been reached in floriculture. Seeds and bulbs are raised on