Passing from Sacramento, and remarking as we go, the patronage which that vegetable impostor, the eucalyptus globulus (or "blue-gum" of Australia) has secured, both as an ornamental--save the mark!--and a shade-tree, two purposes for which by itself the eucalyptus is specially unfitted, we find ourselves once more in a world given up to harvesting. A monotonous panorama of stubble and standing crops, with clumps of pretty oak timber studding the undulating land, leads us to the diversified approaches to San Francisco. It is old travellers' ground, but replete with the interest which attaches to variety of scenery, continual indications of vast wealth, and a rapidly growing prosperity. But one word, before we reach the town, for that wonderful natural crop--the "wild oats," which clothe every vacant acre of the country on this Pacific watershed with harvests as close and as regular as if the land had been tilled, and the ground sown, by human agency. This surprising plant is said to have been brought to California by the Spaniards, and to have run wild from the original fields. But whatever its origin, it is now growing in such vast prairies that whole tribes of Indians used to look to it as the staple of their food. But better crops are fast displacing it, and as for the Indian, California no longer belongs to him or his bison-herds. Further east, that is to say, from the Platte Valley to the Sierra Nevada, the "bunch grass" was the great natural provision for the wild herds of the wild man, and it still ranks as one of the most valuable features of otherwise barren regions in Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. To the student of Nature, however, it is far more interesting as one of the most beautiful examples of her kindly foresight, for the bunch grass grows where nothing else can find nourishment, and just when all other grasses are useless as fodder, it throws out young juicy shoots, thrives under the snow, and then in May, when other grasses are abundant, it dies! Somebodv has said that without the mule and the pig America would never have been colonized. That may be as it may be. But the real pioneer of the West was the bison, for the first emigrants followed exactly in the footsteps of the retiring herds, and these in their turn grazed their way towards the Pacific in the line of the bunch grass.