| Approximate yield | $6,605,467 61 | +---------------------------------------+-----------------+ When it is considered that this is the showing of one of the newest communities on the continent, numbering only the population of what we would call a small city, suffering for want of capital and nearly all that capital brings with it, there is no longer occasion for surprise at the provincial boast that they possess far more extensive and richer fishing-fields than any on the Atlantic coast. Time and enterprise will surely test this assertion, but it is already evident that there is a vast revenue to be wrested from those waters. I have not spoken of the sealing, which yielded $236,000 in 1887, and may yet be decided to be exclusively an American and not a British Columbian source of profit. Nor have I touched upon the extraction of oil from herrings and from dog-fish and whales, all of which are small channels of revenue. I enjoyed the good-fortune to talk at length with a civil engineer of high repute who has explored the greater part of southern British Columbia--at least in so far as its main valleys, waterways, trails, and mountain passes are concerned. Having learned not to place too high a value upon the printed matter put forth in praise of any new country, I was especially pleased to obtain this man's practical impressions concerning the store and quality and kinds of timber the province contains. He said, not to use his own words, that timber is found all the way back from the coast to the Rockies, but it is in its most plentiful and majestic forms on the west slope of those mountains and on the west slope of the Coast Range. The very largest trees are between the Coast Range and the coast. The country between the Rocky Mountains and the Coast Range is dry by comparison with the parts where the timber thrives best, and, naturally, the forests are inferior. Between the Rockies and the Kootenay River cedar and tamaracks reach six and eight feet in diameter, and attain a height of 200 feet not infrequently. There are two or three kinds of fir and some pines (though not very many) in this region. There is very little leaf-wood, and no hard-wood. Maples are found, to be sure, but they are rather more like bushes than trees to the British Columbian mind. As one moves westward the same timber prevails, but it grows shorter and smaller until the low coast country is reached. There, as has been said, the giant forests occur again. This coast region is largely a flat country, but there are not many miles of it.