Pomeroy

This is a proceeding to condemn “all the estate, right, title, and interest” of the defendants in and to a tract of land embracing about three hundred and fifteen acres, for the purpose of enabling the plaintiff—a municipal corporation—to construct and maintain thereon the “headworks” of its projected system for supplying water to its inhabitants for private and municipal purposes." The defendants, appealing from a decree of condemnation and from an order overruling their motion for a new trial, not only allege numerous errors in the rulings of the superior court, but challenge the correctness of its findings of fact in many important particulars. With respect to these disputed facts it will be necessary to state the various contentions of the parties in discussing the particular legal questions to which they give rise, and, passing them over for the present, we,will, in this connection, only attempt to set forth the more general aspect of the case, as to which there is no substantial disagreement.

The city of Los Angeles, at the date of the commencement of this action, June 8, 1893, contained a population of about seventy thousand souls and covered an area of about twenty…

I concur in the views expressed by the chief justice, except as to that part of the opinion in which certain rulings made by the trial court are declared erroneous.

1. The first has regard to the time when the property is to be valued. The statute declares that the right to the property shall be deemed to accrue at the date of the summons, “and its actual value at that date shall be the measure of the compensation.”

*648 The chief justice concedes that ordinarily market value is the true measure and the only practical test of the actual value, still, “in the case where discoveries made after the issuance of summons demonstrate that the actual intrinsic value of the land, at that date, was greater than its market value—in other words, when it appears that market value is no criterion of actual value—those discoveries should he taken into consideration.” Such discoveries are claimed in this case. (Code Civ. Proc., sec. 1249.)

It is said if a gold mine worth millions of dollars had been discovered in this land the day after summons was issued, the city could take the land by paying its value for agricultural purposes.

The supposition is an impossible one. A gold mine of the known…