The Bay Islands are small, but of considerable importance. Roatan, the largest, is about thirty miles long by nine broad, and in its highest part nearly a thousand feet above the sea. Guanaja, or Bonaca, the first land of Central America discovered by Columbus on his fourth voyage, is fifteen miles from Roatan, and of an extent of five by nine miles. This group is fertile, and with a fine climate should prove very attractive to settlers from the North who appreciate the waste of life in an arctic climate of eight months each year, when all vegetation ceases to grow, and man himself can be kept alive only by artificial heat, where the farmer must toil wearily four months for the poor produce that is to sustain him all the “famine months,” and the laborer live poorly all the twelvemonth, whatever be his work. The history of Honduras has not been a happy one, even since its revolt from the Spanish yoke in 1821, and revolutions have been the rule; but in 1865 a new Constitution was adopted, with some prospect of internal quiet. The four hundred thousand inhabitants include perhaps seven thousand whites, the Spanish population being mainly on the Pacific side, Caribs along the Atlantic coast, and several thousand of the mixed races, the great majority being Indios, known as Xicaques and Poyas. Perhaps the most adverse influence to the progress of this naturally rich republic, next to the revolutions, was the scandalous loan for building the “Honduras Inter-oceanic Railway” from Puerto Cortez to the Gulf of Fonseca, a hundred and forty-eight miles. This loan, amounting in 1876 to $27,000,000, was as complete a swindle as has ever disgraced American finances; but the people of Honduras, although responsible for the debt, had little to do with its origin, and cannot rightly be blamed for not paying interest on what they never had any advantage from. The internal debt is about $2,000,000. _Nicaragua._—Of nearly the same area as Honduras, Nicaragua is chiefly distinguished by its lower level and the great lake which offers so inviting a route for an inter-oceanic canal. The same fertility and genial climate extend from the Hondureñan uplands into Chontales and Segovia, where Northerners can enjoy life; but it is hot and unwholesome near the sea, especially throughout the Mosquito Reservation, where the frequent river-floods and the miasmatic marshes breed an endemic fever very fatal to Europeans. The mean annual temperature (excepting the highlands) is about 80° F., falling to 70° at night, and rising to 90° in the hottest weather. The seasons, as elsewhere in Central America, are two,—the wet from May to November, the dry including the winter months. At Rivas, on the isthmus between the Lago de Nicaragua and the Pacific, the annual rainfall is about a hundred and two inches; elsewhere the summer rainfall is about ninety, and the winter less than ten.