THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA. CONTINUED.

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 35°; 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