Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 2.djvu/460

382 hills upon the ocean, is blessed with a soil of singular fertility, a fine, dry atmosphere, and a soft, delicious climate. It is wooded with majestic trees, covered with rich grasses, brilliant with an endless variety of flowers, and produces profusely the fruits of the temperate and tropical zones.

South of Point Concepcion the climate and general appearance of the country are changed. From that point the coast bends almost directly east; the face of the country obtains a more southern exposure, and is sheltered by ranges of low mountains or hills from the bleak violence of north-west storms. The climate accordingly is more genial, and fosters a richer variety of productions than is found on the northern coasts.

The valleys parallel with the coast range, as well as those which extend eastwardly in all directions among the hills towards the great plain of the Sacramento, are of unsurpassed fertility. Their soil is a deep, black alluvian, and so porous that it remains perfectly unbroken by gullies, notwithstanding the great quantity of water which falls into it during the wet season. The productiveness of "California," says Frémont in his Memoir on that region, published in 1848, "is greatly modified by the structure of the country, and under this aspect may be considered in three divisions—the southern, below Point Concepcion and the Santa Barbara mountain, about latitude 36°; the northern, from Cape Mendocino, latitude 41°, to the Oregon boundary; and the middle, including the bay and basin of San Francisco and the coast between Point Concepcion and Cape Mendocino. Of these three divisions the rainy season is longest and heaviest in the north, and lightest in the south. Vegetation is governed accordingly—coming with the rains—decaying where they fail. Summer and winter, in our sense of the terms, are not applicable to this part of the country. It is not heat and cold, but wet and dry, which mark the seasons, and the winter months, instead of killing vegetation, revive it. The dry season makes a period of consecutive drought, the only winter in the vegetation of this country, which can hardly be said at any time to cease. In forests, where the soil is sheltered, in low lands of streams and hilly country, where the ground remains moist, grass continues constantly green and flowers bloom in all months of the year.

"In the southern half of the country the long summer drought has rendered irrigation necessary, and the experience of the missions, in their prosperous day, has shown that, in California, as elsewhere, the dryest plains are made productive, and the heaviest