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MEXICAN GULF COAST ILLUSTRATED.
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phere. It is likewise the medium of health and of sickness. Human life could not exist, nor vegetable life either, without this wonderful agent which envelops the earth. Its purity is essential to health. From this it will be seen that the climate of the Coast is one meeting; the conditions which insure healthfulness and comfort; it is a happy mediuhsbetween extremes of heat and cold. The winters are mild and the number of cold and disagreeable days very few. The Summer weather extends into Autumn, but it is rare that much inconvenience is felt from oppressive heat, such as is experienced in Northern States in midsummer. Throughout the Summer in the middle of the day almost without exception, a sea-breeze comes in reducing the temperature to delight those who dwell in this favored region.
Such delightful mornings and evenings as are common on this Coast are never surpassed, and seldom equaled on the globe. The sunsets, resplendent and gorgeous, fill the eye of poet and painter with rapturous delight.
Travelers and tourists, who pass by rail from Mobile to New Orleans, and noting only what is seen from a car window, obtain the most superficial and at the same time, unsatisfactory and misleading impressions of the Gulf Coast along Mississippi Sound. Aside from the ripple of excile-ment among the knots of people at the various stations occasioned by the arrival and departure of trains, there is little that will interest a casual observer. The greater portion of the distance presents a monotonous sameness of unimproved country; land from which the saw timber has been removed, and also a large portion of smaller tree growths which has been converted into charcoal. Nevertheless the fact remains that very little is seen of the economic features of this section. The. general aspects of the region, to one looking for farms, orchards and gardens under a high state of cultivation, are not assuring. Yet the soil is capable, with intelligent management, of yielding in a twelvemonth more dollars to the acre than the prairie soils of the great agricultural States of the West. The same land, in a single year, produces three and four crops; the husbandman plows and reaps every month in the year.
The deposits of valuable clays between Pearl River and Mobile in the three counties lying on the sound in Mississippi and in Mobile County, Alabama, are so vast as to be practical^' inexhaustible. They embrace nearly every clay used for commercial purposes—for brick and tile, pipe, potters’, and fire clays, and kaolin. As yet this great source of wealth has scarcely been touched. From this source alone millions of dollars may be realized annually when capital, improved machinery, and intelligently directed