Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/472

456, bulky, and perishable articles are naturally produced as near as possible to the places of consumption, though improvements enabling them to be more easily and cheaply transported render them more available for distant markets. Such are the compression and baling of hay, the conveyance of dead meats in refrigerated chambers, of live animals in specially adapted wagons and steamships, and of ordinary fresh fruits and vegetables by express trains. More valuable articles and luxuries, such as the finer fruits, sugar, tobacco, and cotton, the cost of transport of which is relatively less important, can and often must be produced in localities specially adapted to them at greater distances from the places of their eventual consumption. Dried fruits are more fitted for distant and uncertain markets than green fruits. Other generally esteemed articles, such as silk, tea, and the finer wines, naturally monopolize the limited areas capable of producing them. On the other hand, as almost any part of the world can grow wheat and the ordinary small grains by the employment of a comparatively limited capital, as the cost of transporting them is inconsiderable, as they are not liable to spoil, and as the enormous quantities in which they are handled and the universal competition among producers of them enable and necessitate their being turned over at the minimum profits, the growth of these indispensable staples is left to the newest, the poorest, and the most remote countries, and to those parts of other countries for which no better employment can be found. A decline in the production of these articles is a sign, beyond doubt, of the increasing wealth of a country, and that it has found better employments for its capital and labor. This is especially noticeable in England, Germany, France, and our own Eastern States; and California also, it may be noted, is discontinuing the production of grain as rapidly as she can find a market for her higher class articles. A still more decided move in the same direction is only restrained in England by the uncertainty of the climate, and the consequent danger of devoting too great an area to pasturage, green crops, fruit, or hops, since an excess of drought is adverse to the first two, and an excess of moisture to the others. The future order of cultivation in the United States is dependent chiefly on the development by irrigation of the vast arid regions of the West, and upon the nature of the resources which may thereby be disclosed, as also upon the description and extent of the trade just beginning between our Pacific coast, Japan, China, Australia, and New Zealand, and that to open up later with the East by the Central American inter-oceanic canal. It is already certain that the convenient position of California for this trade, her variety of climate and elevation, and resulting adaptability for a great choice of productions, insures for her, through the extension of irrigation, a great and