As these hills rise, vegetation becomes scantier. The range of mountains in which gold is found is distinguished by a uniformity of its vegetable kingdom, which is neither meagre nor very abundant. The oak predominates here, only now and then relieved by several varieties of the pine family. As the gold disappears, the reign of the pine and the granite extends. The depositories of gold look universally more smiling to the beholder than their barren neighbors; the former always have the figure described by the line of beauty, viz: the curved line, be they ever so precipitous as they frequently are; a distinction never to be lost sight of. The extent of these auriferous hills is greater than the public know or imagine, but not in the direction it is supposed. They extend beyond the Sacramento and even San Joaquin, northwest of the former and southwest of the latter, bending round the sea coast. Nay, the same formation, with more or less difference, runs along the whole Pacific shores, till it is lost in the southern portion of the Chilean republic, but gold has not been, nor probably will be found anywhere in equal abundance, as in Upper California. This abundance is much, however, exaggerated by the heated imagination of the public. It is not in the nature of placer gold to be durable long. A very few years when there will be many arms at work, will exhaust it; its origin will be the guarantee of this fact. The breadth of this auriferous region limits itself within the lines running north and south from forty to sixty miles from the ridge of the Sierra Nevada; and on the west, as the hills begin to soften into the plains.