picturesque appearance, standing as they do on the brow of some hillock overlooking miles of the adjacent country.

Some of the vineyards in and near Los Angeles are really beautiful, and it is a question whether they can be excelled on this continent. Great pains have been taken to bring them to a high state of cultivation, and now a great deal of wine of excellent quality is made. Some varieties of grapes are dried, and make fair raisins. During the past year, in the season of the vintage, twenty white men and eighty Indian laborers were employed in a vineyard of twenty acres, having under cultivation twenty thousand vines. At this vineyard, they say, they have made fifty-six thousand, five hundred gallons of wine. In the counties of Los Angeles and San Bernardino it is estimated that one million, two hundred thousand gallons of wine were made during the year 1866, and still larger quantities were made in 1867

The Indians in this region are for the most part industrious and good laborers, for which thanks are due to the Catholic Fathers who have lived among them for the last hundred years. The Catholic priests introduced grapes into California and first settled the country. The missions built by them are lasting monuments of their industry, zeal and perseverance, and some of the buildings are models of beauty. This is particularly the case with regard to the mission of San Luis Obispo, which is one of the most extensive on the Pacific coast. For years the kind padres labored with these Indians, and from a condition little better than that of brutes brought them to a knowledge of Christianity and civilization. It was formerly the custom of these Indians to assemble in the missions at nightfall and there sing hymns of thanksgiving. The authority exercised by the priests over them was of a mild and gentle character, and they were taught the ways of peace. All of the aborigines of this section are known as Mission Indians, and live in small settlements near the southern line of the State from Los Angeles to San Diego, where they cultivate their own lands. They seem happy and contented, though a vein of sadness may be discovered which is peculiar to all of the Indians of Southern America. This may be their nature, or it may be caused by a knowledge that their name and nation will before many years cease to exist. They seem listless, are easily controlled, and only on occasions give way to sudden outbursts of fury. As a general thing, however, they are remarkably quiet and wellbehaved, though, like all other Indians, they are occasionally fond of a little fire-water.

There are several towns in Southern California which deserve to be mentioned. Among them are Santa Barbara, a town of about four thousand inhabitants; San Bernardino, containing about two thousand; Monterey, and San

Diego, the latter of which is rapidly improving. All of these are county towns of counties of the same name. In these towns there are still many descendants of the early Spanish settlers, themselves related to the old hidalgos. Monterey was, twenty years ago, the most important town in California, with perhaps the exception of Los Angeles. It is situated on the sea-shore, and is a pleasant place. In nearly all the valleys south of Monterey oranges may be raised in great profusion, and this will in a few years become a matter of commercial importance. It is pleasant to stroll in an orange grove and be able to pick off a stem on which there may be from eight to twelve oranges of fine size and excellent flavor, and for these qualities

the Los Angeles oranges are noted. They ripen during the months of December, January, February, March and April, are then picked and sent to the northward. In the orchards they are worth thirty dollars a thousand, and every year adds to the number of orange groves or orchards.

It will be seen from this that it is a possible thing to write an article respect. ing California without having anything to say about the metropolis of the State or about the mines. With California but two ideas are generally associated, and these are San Francisco and the gold mines. These are all very well and worthy of much attention, but there is certainly something on the Pacific coast outside of either of them.

AN is, at best, an ungrateful ani

MA

mal; and in no way does this innate ingratitude more strongly manifest itself, than in the treatment which that patient friend, the stomach, receives at his hands. The sins of which man

stands impeached before the stomachic tribunal, are sins of commission rather than sins of omission. Among the numerous counts of the indictment, the charge of forgetfulness does not occur. Neither should it; though no organ of the human economy has received worse usage, yet, anomalous as it may seem, this little organ monopolizes no small portion of man's time and attention. The poles and the tropics, the land and the sea, have all been forced to yield up their treasures, which the ingenuity of man has prepared in the most tempting manner to please this little epicure. Yet the stomach is sadly persecuted with the over-eating of the rich and the under-eating of the poor; with Bridget

compounding indigestible dishes according to her kitchen arithmetic; with the hot teas of hysterical women, with the powders and potions of the doctor, and is just beginning to see the light as science better understands its function, and physiological laws are more widely disseminated.

arts.

Pleasing the stomach has, in our own age of progress, become one of the fine Busy housewives, since Eve's time, believing old Dr. Johnson's saying, that a man who does not care for his stomach is not to be trusted, have brought premature wrinkles to their brows in the search after those combinations which are both wholesome and palatable. A cook-book is, by no means, the worst kind of literature. Doubtless ill-cooked meals have turned more stomachs from friends to enemies, and caused their owners to call them, with the dyspeptic Carlyle of "shooting Niagara" memory, "diabolical machines,"

than the pastries and ices of professional gastronomes. Cupid recognizes the wonderful power of a good dinner in drawing out all one's latent amiabilíty, and uses it as a valuable adjuvant in controlling the affairs of the heart. Fanny Fern says the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. I have a friend who, I always fancied, was cooked into the hymenial vows, by the culinary skill of her who now so gracefully rules his heart and table; and thrice happy are they, with no indigestible dishes to mar peace or jostle love. The author of "Married Life at Hillside," honestly confesses that good coffee guided the boy archer's arrow to his bachelor heart, lost his bachelor friends a genial companion, and won dyspeptic Mrs. Gray a hen-pecked husband. Perhaps, reader, you have witnessed (in your neighbor's family) one of those family episodes the good housewife in tears, and her liege lord like a thunder-cloud over lead-like biscuit or smoked coffee. As powerful an autocrat as a good dinner is, it often happens that the choicest dainties of the season, prepared in a manner so artistic as to delight the spirits of Apicius or Brillat-Savarin, excite only disgust and beget ill-humor and despondency. The story is only complete when good digestion is added to the good dinner.

--

Molecular death is the very essence of life. We do an act and die; we breathe a breath and die; we thank God in the evening for our preservation during the day, and in the morning for the safe keeping of us during the night, and those cells which prompt, alike with those that utter the prayer, lose their life in the praying. To the organs of digestion has been assigned the duty of furnishing the proper material for the regeneration which this continual celldeath imposes on the tissues. Truly 66 every meal is a rescue from one death and lays up for another."

The manipulations of nature - -the

prototype of all chemists—in her divine laboratory, were seen "as through a glass darkly," and, consequently, but imperfectly understood, until the accidental discharge of a musket, very fortunately for science but very unfortunately for Alexis St. Martin, left him with a side door in his stomach, through which inquisitive doctors peeped and stole nature's secrets.

Chem

Chemistry cannot make a man, though Paracelsus, as early as the fifteenth century, claimed to have done so. istry, however, has put the created man into her crucibles and test tubes, applied her re-agents, and found of what manner of stuff he is made. This analysis proves the human organism to be composed of only about fifteen ultimate elements. "It is a simple matter of fact," says Prof. Haughton in an address before the British Medical Association, "that all the different manifestations of animal work are the result of the reception and assimilation of a few cubic feet of oxygen, a few ounces of water, of starch, of fat and of flesh." Now, when this waste, of which we have already spoken, reaches a certain amount, the sensation of hunger is experienced, and the stomach telegraphs to the brain along the sympathetic nerves for a supply of one or all of those fifteen elements, of which we have found the body to be composed. This message is speedily recognized by the brain, and the brain is not long in translating the message into plain Anglo Saxon, for the benefit of kitchen Biddy. The food having been supplied, it is decomposed by those juices, some five in number, which are secreted by the glands and the mucous membrane lining the alimentary tract. The action of these fluids is not merely to liquefy the solid constituents of the food, but to exert a catalytic action-a sort of magic, "presto, veto, change"-by which the ingestæ are converted into other substances, of which blood and brain and muscle are made. While the blood

vessels and lacteals are absorbing these products of digestion into the general circulation, let us learn how this newlyprepared material can reach the wornout atom in the body of a bone or muscle. If you examine any organ of the body with a microscope, you will find it to be an aggregation of cells, each cell being surrounded by a network of capillaries. These little hairlike vessels twine around and interlace with the cells, much as the creeper twines around and covers the latticework of your summer-house. The process of digestion completed and the results of the process in the blood, they are rafted along to the capillaries, when, by a peculiar process, muscle takes up the elements of musculine and pays for it in worthless creatine; brain abstracts the elements of nervine and yields up cholesterin. The tissues are sharp traders, and invariably get the best of the bargain-exchanging the old and wornout for the new and life-giving. The blood, of course, soon becomes bankrupt

the proceeds of its exchanges may be likened to the worthless notes of the bankrupt merchant-and can do nothing better than unload its cargo into the sewers of the body to be excreted.

Physiologically speaking, this process of digestion constitutes one of the essential differences between my next-door neighbor and the pumpkin that grows in his garden (I fancy that my neighbor has many points of resemblance to his pumpkin, but that is a question between my neighbor and myself). My neighbor must prepare his food before it is assimilated; the pumpkin assimilates its food in the form existing in the air or soil. We are now prepared to understand how a proper performance of the digestive function is essential to the perfect mental and physical development of the man. Muscle and brain (which is the instrument of that mysterious something called mind, the nous)

alike draw nourishment and strength from the same source. Brain, too, is intimately dependent upon muscle. Though nerve fibre does the thinking, muscular fibre must make that thinking tangible. Place a stationary engine in a papiermache setting; turn on steam, and what will be the result? Place a ten horsepower brain in a one horse-power body; attempt to develop its power, and what will be the result? The pages of history are full of the funeral notices of those who with feeble physiques have flashed forth, won the admiration of the world by the brilliancy of their exploits, and thenflashed out, the physical system unable to meet the demand made upon it. Thus, "Pollock's Course of Time" was completed in his twenty-eighth year, and at twenty-eight Pollock's course of life was run, and Scotia's promising bard went into a too early grave. "His physical energies, like the oil of his midnight lamp, went to feed the everburning blaze of thought."

The

There is something wondrously mysterious about this body of ours. finite mind cannot solve the problem of life. To know that the calf, whose playful gambols over the neighboring lawn I have often watched from this window, was yesterday brute, but is today man, and for aught I know may now be selling dry-goods or compounding drugs in the organism of some uptown clerk, is truly wonderful. Perchance, the veritable Cochin China that in his matutinal basso proclaimed the coming dawn, and frightened from my couch the "fickle pensioners of Morpheus' train," may now furnish the nervine that dictates this article and the musculine that jots it down. present then for solution to the coming physiologist the following equation: Rooster-/-Digestion="A Talk about Digestion in THE WESTERN MONTHLY." We are, unfortunately, a race of dyspeptics. The little bright-eyed cherub of few moons, nestled in its mother's

We

lap, is racked by colic, and the ills thicken fast as he passes through childhood and manhood to the grave. Youth and happiness have grown to be synonyms. Sweetly has Wordsworth sung of "The days when I was young, and hope and beauty went a-Maying." And through the elasticity of her spirits, youth rebounds from under the crushing weight of disappointment as the spring rebounds from the bending. Why? The answer comes, in prose and verse, that youth is free from the trials and cares of maturer years. It is true, youth wears no wrinkles—combs out no gray "fallen snowflakes of the coming years." But are not the defeats and disappointments which beset the youthful skirmisher in life's battles as crushing to his young soul as the sterner defeats of the scarred veteran grown aged in battling? Little sorrows to little hearts are as crushing as great sorrows to hearts grown strong and hard. The true explanation is found in the activity of the child's system. The heart throbs out a healthy rythm. Good blood-the result of good, healthy digestion goes coursing through their veins, infusing new life and energy into their very being. Blessed be the nursery, with its bevy of romping children- the merry laugh rippling forth an eloquent story of enjoyment and good digestion-the lilies on their cheeks rivaling their sisters of the vale in beauty and delicacy of coloring. Is it not fine fun to watch their sport? and is it not a sight to soften a cynic or wed a bachelor? But this picture has its shade. It is no borrowed sadness to fear that soon, in pleasing the palate and disregarding nature's laws, their stomachs will be turned to enemies, or, at best, lukewarm friends, bad blood generated, and they grow into a wretched, joyless parentage. In short, the whistling boy or laughing girl may grow into a world-hating dyspeptic. It does not come within the scope of this article to enumerate the

probable causes that shall convert thi merry, laughing boy into a grumbling dyspeptic man, but must make mentio of one -the bane of fashionable lifelate suppers. Late suppers are a tel rible curse. When the day wraps itsel in its mantle of darkness, it is the signa for mankind to prepare for rest-res for mind, and muscle, and stomach Eating late and full suppers is poo preparation. The youth of the presen day seem to have no blessings for "early to bed" at night, and many curses for that "artificial cut-off, early rising." And no wonder; more dyspeptics than the poet Cowper have experienced the feelings, on rising of a morning, which he thus describes: "I awake, like a toad out of Acheron, covered with the ooze and slime of melancholy." Late suppers

"Make sleep a pain

And turn its balm to wormwood."

Often have I watched people in the fashionable saloons of an evening and listened to their exclamations, "So delicious! How refreshing!" Yes! deluded mortals, as angry stomachs and aching heads are delicious! as sleepless nights and troublous dreams are refreshing!

See that sunny-haired and sunnyfaced butterfly of a woman, brim full of love for the Adolphus at her side, partaking so liberally of those delicacies. All is joyous now; but the same cause that prompts such an outgushing of affection for Adolphus to-night, will on the morrow scowl upon pater familias, box the baby's ears, broomstick the cat and darken the canary's cage to silence his song. "The little stoppages," says Sidney Smith, "in the bodily circulation, are the things which, above all others, darken our views of life and man." A friend once went to him in the most deplorable condition, and, like Rachel of old, refused to be comforted. His daughter's cough had settled her lungs; his wife was extravagant and

upon