What one may do has often advantages never foreseen. A miner, for instance, goes into a dry and arid country, wholly unfit for horticulture, and what he needs to support him has to be brought hundreds of miles; yet when he has done all he can and deserts the place because it produces nothing, that which he has done enables thousands to live on it after he has been obliged to leave it. Thus the early miners in California had to leave after the precious metals were exhausted, but the ditches they dug were what the farmer wanted.

Many of these ditches which were constructed at enormous cost in the heyday of placer mining, now that the placers are all worked out, constitute a perennial source of increase and wealth to the husbandman, who has succeeded to the miner and come to stay.

One of these ditches, called the Bear River Ditch, is 70 miles in length, and cost 2,500,000 dollars to build, in the year 1851; it carries about 3,000 miners' inches of water, or about 45 cubic feet per second. It was constructed to bring the water of the Bear river down to the rich placer mines of Placer county, and was used for mining exclusively, but not now at all. Running, as it does, through the fertile foot-hills of that county, it is a permanent guarantee of fruitfulness to the vineyards and farms which are being planted at either hand, on lands which lie below the level of the ditch.