_Towns, &c._--The capital of British Guiana is Georgetown, at the mouth of the Demerara river, on its right bank, with a population of about 50,000. New Amsterdam, on the right bank of the Berbice river, has a population of about 7500. Each possesses a mayor and town council, with statutory powers to impose rates. There are nineteen incorporated villages, and ten other locally governed areas known as country districts, the affairs of which are controlled by local authorities, known as village councils and country authorities respectively. _Population._--The census of 1891 gave the population of British Guiana as 278,328. There was no census taken in 1901. By official estimates the population at the end of 1904 was 301,923. Of these some 120,000 were negroes and 124,000 East Indians; 4300 were Europeans, other than Portuguese, estimated at about 11,600, and some 30,000 of mixed race. The aborigines--Arawaks, Caribs, Wapisianas, Warraws, &c.--who numbered about 10,000 in 1891, are now estimated at about 6500. In 1904 the birth-rate for the whole colony was 30.3 per 1000 and the death-rate 28.8. _Physical Geography._--The surface features of British Guiana may be divided roughly into four regions: first, the alluvial seaboard, flat and below the level of high-water; secondly, the forest belt, swampy along the rivers but rising into undulating lands and hills between them; thirdly, the savannahs in and inland of the forest belt, elevated table-lands, grass-covered and practically treeless; and fourthly, the mountain ranges. The eastern portion of the colony, from the source of its two largest rivers, the Corentyn and Essequibo, is a rough inclined plain, starting at some 900 ft. above sea-level at the source of the Takutu in the west, but only some 400 at that of the Corentyn in the west, and sloping down gradually to the low alluvial flats about 3 ft. below high-water line. The eastern part is generally forested; the western is an almost level savannah, with woodlands along the rivers. The northern portion of British Guiana, the alluvial flats alluded to already, consists of a fluviomarine deposit extending inland from 25 m. to 30 m., gradually rising to about 12 ft. above high-water mark and ending against beds of sandy clay, the residua of igneous rocks decomposed _in situ_, which form an extensive undulating region rising to 150 ft. above the sea and stretching back to the forest-covered hills. Roughly parallel to the existing coast-line are narrow reefs of sand and sea-shells, which are dunes indicating the trend of former limits of the sea, and still farther back are the higher "sand hills," hills of granite or diabase with a thick stratum of coarse white sand superimposed. From the coast-line seawards the ocean deepens very gradually, and at low tide extensive flats of sand and of mixed clay and sand (called locally "caddy") are