These figures cannot, however, be relied upon for the population. With a coast-line of two hundred and eighty miles on the Caribbean Sea, the only port is San Juan del Norte (Greytown), formed by the northern branch of the delta of the San Juan; and this is now nearly choked with sand. The Pacific coast is bold and rocky, extending nearly two hundred miles from Coseguina Point to Salinas Bay, and has several convenient harbors, as San Juan del Sur, Brito, and, best of all, Realejo. Among the chief cities is Leon, founded by Francisco Fernandez de Córdoba in 1523 in Imbita, near the northwest shore of Lago de Managua, whence it was moved in 1610 to the present site at the Indian town of Subtiaba. Managua, the capital of the republic, was nearly destroyed in 1876 by a land-slide, but is now rebuilt. Granada is the collegiate town of the republic, and is on the shores of the great lake. A railway has long been in process of construction to connect the capital with the ocean. In 1882 the telegraphic system of eight hundred miles was completed, and eighty-one thousand despatches were forwarded the preceding year through twenty-six offices. In 1882 the total attendance at the national schools was only five thousand, or less than eight per cent of the whole population. The annual grant for the purposes of education was $50,000. The Mosquito coast cuts from Nicaragua a large portion of her shore-line, precisely as British Honduras robs Guatemala of hers; and this has been a cause of serious trouble. This territory, which is about forty miles wide, had been under the protection of Great Britain from 1655 to 1850, when that very un-American document the Clayton-Bulwer treaty gave England certain rights in her colony of Belize in exchange for such claims as she had to this coast, and by the treaty of Managua, in 1860, she formally ceded her protectorate to Nicaragua; but there are still several disputed points. _Costa Rica._—The fifth and most southern republic of Central America has an area of only twenty-one thousand square miles. The Atlantic coast is low, and the country is covered with a dense forest, while the Pacific slope is characterized by wide savannas, or _llanuras_. Between these borders are high volcanoes and an elevated table-land three to four thousand feet above the sea,—the latter almost the only cultivated land in the State. The forests are largely composed of very valuable trees,—mahogany, ebony, brazil-wood, and oak; and the usual tropical fruits grow well. Coffee, however, is the staple export, being grown extensively in the neighborhood of San José and Cartago; the soil most favorable being dark volcanic ash, from three to eighteen feet deep. The amount exported in 1874 was valued at $4,464,000; in 1885 the amount is placed at $4,219,617.