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Show 367. honey was a kind of spiritual food, "exactly delicious," Muir had thought in 1874, "and no wonder, inasmuch as it was in great part derived from the nectal bells of a huckleberry bog by bees that were let alone to follow their own sweet ways." In apparent seriousness, Muir considered the possibility of bee-culture which had never gained much attention in the great Central Valley, where honey and wax consumed at home was "scarcely taken into account among the coarser products of the farm." Here the contrast between coarse and fine was taken a step further, into a condemnation of all coarser agricultural practices. If commercial bee-culture began in California in 1853, it made little progress, while "sheep, cattle, and grain raising are the chief industries, as they require less skill and care, while the profits thus far have been greater." Muir knew that agriculture as fortune seeking, "wildcat agriculture," as he called it, had destroyed the Central Valley, ranches becoming centers of desolation, not truly homes. Though he foresaw the time when the whole valley would be tilled like a garden, with irrigation, "giving rise to prosperous towns, wealth, arts, etc." - when there would "be few left, even among botanists, to deplore the vanished primeval flora" - still, he saw at present only waste, and in 188 2 he was disgusted. His complex and ambivalent attitude toward agriculture was clear, and may have indicated the difficulty he was having in adjusting to the prospect of life as a farmer in the Alhambra Valley. Really, he found the prospect of a Central Valley |