Both Godman and I agreed in thinking that San Bartolo would be an excellent centre for a naturalist to make a long stay at. Though many collectors have visited this part of Mexico, the variety and number of different birds, plants and insects seem so great that novelties are. even now constantly discovered, almost always by foreigners, as Mexicans, like the Spaniards, very rarely have any taste for or interest in natural history.
Returning to El Paso in the beginning of May we passed again through a wide tract of desert country covered with sage-brush, cactus and other desert types of vegetation, which continue until the San Gorgonio Pass in Southern California is crossed. Here at an elevation of 2,000 to 3,000 feet, overlooked on one side by the snowy San Jacinto mountains, and on the other by the still loftier and more wooded San Bernardino range, we came on the first large tract of cultivation I had seen since leaving Central Mexico in the shape of immense fields of barley, grown without water and now nearly ripe. Much of this is cut for hay, which seems to be a more profitable way of using it than for grain. When we got to Beaumont, the first of the new settlements for which Southern California is remarkable in the history of American progress was reached.
Town lots here, as in many other Californian settlements, run back from the railway right to the foothills, and are held by land speculators at a price which seemed to me ridiculous in comparison with their real agri¬ cultural value. For though a great deal of land is capable of growing much more barley, alfalfa and fruit than a stranger would suppose possible, yet it is mostly of such a light and sandy nature that water is indispensable in average seasons, and water is so costly that I do not see how it can pay to bring it to much of this land. The climate of South California is charming in winter, and enables men to live in a way that would be impossible in the Northern and Eastern States, yet even climate may be purchased at too dear a price, as I believe some of the settlers and speculators have already discovered. The story goes that a real estate man, when trying to sell to a New Englander a tract of this country, expatiated on its many virtues and finally declared that the only things necessary to make it a terrestrial paradise were good society and water. "Is that all you want?" said the Eastern man, "Why, that is all they want in hell!"—a saying which is about as expressive as General Sherman’s well-known opinion about Texas.
Here in San Bernardino county, where I stayed ten or twelve days, we had our first rambles among the Californian flowers, many of which were already so familiar to me in English gardens. Among the crowd of annuals, herbaceous plants and shrubs which we gathered in and about San Bernardino, I should select the following as most conspicuous and beautiful; and though we can grow some of them better in England than in the Eastern States, yet we cannot have them in anything like their native beauty. Yucca Whipplei is quite a superb plant, by far the finest of its genus as far as I know. It comes to perfection on the plains and foothills, attaining an elevation of at least 4,000 feet, and producing in some cases, a flower stem twelve to fifteen feet high, of which at least two-thirds is covered with dense branches of creamy-white or sometimes
