Texas is a country of great extremes and contradictions. It is the hottest and coldest; the driest and wettest; it has the most streams and the least water, some wet and some dry, and mostly dry at that; the best soil and the poorest, very little of the latter; the most cattle and the least milk, and butter, and cheese, and beef; the most salubrious climate and most sudden changes of weather; the least rain and heaviest rain-storms; the sunniest sky and most terrific thunder-storms; the most balmy Gulf breezes and most bitter biting northers; long rivers and least navigation; the heaviest pine forests and least pine lumber; the best types of society, and the meanest the sun ever shone upon.
Portable saw-mills, located along projected railroads in those pine forests lying in Eastern Texas, hundreds of miles in extent, taking Brazos River as the dividing line between Eastern and Western Texas, would coin money for the proprietors. And the prediction is safe that the time is not far distant when the railroads will be built, those forests felled and cut up into lumber, towns spring up, and the "wilderness bud and blossom as the rose."
The wet and dry seasons come in pretty regular alternations, each in a series of seven to ten years. And nature, ever faithful, with her "canny hand" has recorded these meteorological histories in trees of the forest, and the record may be traced back through a period of two hundred years. The unmistakable record is traceable in the thick and thin rings or grains of the trees, varying in thickness from that of a wafer to a quarter of an inch, in grades from thin to thick, the former representing the dry, and the latter the wet seasons.
Now some crops of the country are more successfully raised in the dry seasons, and others in the wet. Cotton is produced in the greatest abundance in a comparatively dry season; corn the reverse. So that, by keeping and observing a critical meteorological record the planter can calculate with a good degree of certainty what crops would promise best from year to year. Thus, we believe, Providence has made it feasible, through science and art, for man to live and prosper in any country or climate under the sun. And further, the normal products of the different countries and climates are most suitable for the industries, health and happiness of the inhabitants thereof.