I give, therefore, not opinions, but facts.
Gilroy stands in a long and broad plain, a very rich piece of alluvial bottom, with water so abundant that artesian wells are easily bored and very common.

At the depth of one hundred and thirty feet they get flowing wells, and it happened in one case of which I heard that the water came up with such force as to prevent the casing going down into the well, and the pressure of the water broke away the ground, enlarged the bore of the well, and threatened to flood a considerable area, so that the farmers gathered in force, and by means of an iron caisson loaded with stones, and with many cart-loads of stones besides, plugged up the dangerous hole.
The land is a deep alluvial loam, easily worked, and here, and in some neighboring valleys, many tobacco growers have been engaged for the last ten or twelve years.

Mr.Culp, who was a tobacco grower, and, if I understood him rightly, also a manufacturer in New York for some years before he came here, and who appears, at any rate, to be a very thorough farmer and a lover of clean fields, has planted tobacco here for fifteen years.

He has a farm of about seven hundred acres, four hundred of which have this year been in tobacco.

From him and others I learned the following particulars of the way in which they cultivate the plant in California.
They sow the seed from the 1st to the 10th of January, and sometimes even in December.