Florida lies between the degrees of twenty-five and thirty-one north latitude, and eighty to eighty-eight west longitude from Greenwich. The northern boundary being nearly three hundred and fifty miles from east to west, and its length from north to south, nearly four hundred miles. It is in the same latitude as Central Arabia, Northern Hindostan, the Desert of Sahara, the northern portion of Burmah, the southern part of China and Northern Mexico. The average width of the peninsula is about eighty miles, and every part is fanned by either the Trade or Gulf winds, rendering the air delightfully pleasant in midsummer. The most marked geographical feature of the State is the enormous extent of coastline--the Atlantic and Gulf exceeding eleven hundred miles, with numerous large bays, offering great facilities for commercial intercourse. The northern part of the State is hilly and rolling. Midway of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, an elevated ridge extends through Middle and South Florida to Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, gradually sloping to the Atlantic Ocean on the east and to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico on the west. The elevated lands are mostly pine, interspersed with black-jack, post, and water-oak. At the base and along the water courses, are rich hammock lands bordered with flat and rolling prairie, with the everlasting scrub palmetto everywhere. The southern portion of the State is at this time a vast cattle range, embracing thousands of acres on which a surveyor's chain has never fallen. In 1860, the population of Florida was 140,000; in 1880, it was 267,000, and at this time, it is probably in round numbers 300,000. When the vast area of the State, sixty thousand square miles, comprising nearly thirty-eight million acres of land, is taken into consideration, it will be seen that we are not badly crowded. The sale by Governor Bloxham of four million acres of "swamp land" to the Disston and Anglo-German syndicates is a mere bagatelle. The county in which I reside--Manatee--is nearly as large as the combined States of Connecticut and Rhode Island. It is truly a county of "magnificent distances," the county seat, Pine Level, being forty miles south of the villages of Braidentown and Manatee, on its northern border. "No pent-up Utica contracts our powers." We do things on a large scale. We raise the most luscious oranges, the largest watermelons, and the most appetizing pineapples and bananas on the face of the earth; and I do not think I elongate the truth when I say, that in point of size our alligators, mosquitoes, and grasshoppers will compare favorably with those of any other country. Our frogs are also as sprightly as Mark Twain's "jumping frog of the Calaveras." Our cucumbers, tomatoes, snap-beans, squashes, and cabbages reach the cities of the North and West three months in advance of any other State of the Union.