Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/752

732 in sublimity to Tacoma in Washington Territory, the entire elevation of which last (14,300 feet) can, in some places, be taken in at a single glance from the sea-level and a water-foreground. The comparatively narrow and gently sloping strip of land which the traveler thus reaches on the Atlantic side in journeying from Mexico to Vera Cruz extends from the base of the great plateau to the ocean, and, with its counterpart on the Pacific side, constitutes in the main the so-called "Tierras Calientes" (hot lands), or the tropical part of Mexico. The average width of these coast-lands on the Atlantic is about sixty miles, while on the Pacific it varies from forty to seventy miles.

Considered as a whole, the geographical configuration and position of Mexico have been compared to an immense cornucopia, with its mouth turned toward the United States and its concave side on the Atlantic; having an extreme length of about 2,000 miles, and a varying width of from 1,000 to 130 miles. Its territorial area is 701,791 square miles, or a little larger than that part of the United States, east of the Mississippi River, exclusive of the States of Wisconsin and Mississippi; and this cornucopia in turn, as has been before intimated, consists of an immense table-land, nine tenths of which have an average elevation of from 5,000 to 7,000 feet. Such an elevation in the latitude of 42° (Boston or New York) would have given the country an almost Arctic character; but under the Tropic of Cancer, or in latitudes 18° to 25° north, the climate at these high elevations is almost that of perpetual spring. At these high elevations of the Mexican plateau furthermore, the atmosphere is so lacking in moisture, that meat, bread, or cheese, never molds or putrefies, but only spoils by drying up. Perspiration, even when walking briskly in the middle of the day, does not gather or remain upon the forehead or other exposed portions of the body; and it is only through this peculiarity of the atmosphere that the city of Mexico, with its large population, and its soil reeking with filth through lack of any good and sufficient drainage, has not long ago been desolated with pestilence. As it is, the death-rate of the city is reported to be larger than at almost any of the great centers of the world's population from which sanitary science has been enabled to obtain data.

The surface of this great Mexican plateau, or table-land, although embracing extensive areas of comparatively level surface, which are often deserts, is nevertheless largely broken up by ranges of mountains, or detached peaks—some of which, like Popocatepetl, Orizaba, and Toluca, rise to great elevations—a circumstance which it is important to remember, and will be again referred to, in considering the possible future material development of the country.

Again, if we except certain navigable channels which make up for short distances from the sea into the low, narrow strips of coast-lands, there is not a navigable river in all Mexico; or, indeed, any stream,