Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/544

 524 One gives the height of Cuernavaca above the sea—I take instances at random at 4900 feet, and its population at 12,000; the other 5380 feet, and 16,320 people. The standing army ranges from 22,367 in "Conkling" to 68,000 infantry and 13,000 cavalry in "Janvier" (stating no other basis of calculation), and to 45,000 in Mr. D. A, Wells, who bases an important argument upon it. These are not isolated examples; the same astounding discrepancies on simple matters of fact, the truth of which, it might be thought, outside of Mexico, could be arrived at with the greatest ease, continue throughout. Perhaps the moral is that we should throw ourselves even more unreservedly than ever into the arms of the picturesque, accuracy in the descriptions of which is not changed by the lapse of these few years last past, any more than it was by the hundred or two years preceding them. The enterprising firm of Prida, Navarro & Co. are starting a commercial agency which may be of use to our merchants, but in many respects the Baron Humboldt still continues the leading authority. Mr. Conkling tells us, what will puzzle the visitor, that the principal pyramid of Teotihuacan is made of "blocks of basalt and trachyte rock." Again he says, naively, that "all the churches throughout the country [having already made the same claim for the Academy of Fine Arts at Mexico] are full of pictures, most of which are the work of Murillo, Velasquez, Zurbaran, and Ribera." This is an opinion of a different sort from the Connecticut school-district view of Mr. Warner, that it is all "old Spanish sacred rubbish," and it must be news, indeed, to the connoisseurs. The principal service of Janvier is to furnish for the first time a full and intelligent account of a number of the fine churches by which the attention is everywhere forcibly arrested, with some indications on the