Guatemala 40,776 1,500,000 Salvador 7,335 554,000 Honduras 39,600 300,000 Nicaragua 58,170 300,000 Costa Rica 26,040 200,000 ------- --------- 171,921 2,854,000 III. Guatemala 50,600 1,200,000 Salvador 9,600 600,000 Honduras 40,000 400,000 Nicaragua 40,000 (1882) 275,816 Costa Rica 21,000 200,000 ------- --------- 161,200 2,675,816 Without surveys and without a proper census of the Indian tribes no scientific description of the country can be given. Humboldt’s theory of an Andean cordillera has been disputed, and his mountain-chain has proved to be a confusing (but not confused) series of mountain-ridges. Yet it well may prove that the great naturalist was right; and so far as we now know from maps and personal observation, the vast earth-wrinkle which extends along the western border of our continent is a mountain-range of definite direction (about E. 20° S. to W. 20° N.) in Central America, and there occupying nearly the whole width of the continent. If we can picture to ourselves the formation in those remote ages, that it is the geologist’s task to rehabilitate in thought, of a vast ridge, not sharp like the typical mountain range, but of broad dimensions like the swell of some vast ocean, we shall have the material then forming the earth’s crust bent upwards, and in unelastic places broken, and this partly or entirely beneath the ocean. The rising land as the ages passed would be acted upon not only by the ocean waves and currents, but by the torrential rains, which were of a force and frequency that even our water-spouts of the present age cannot equal. Cracks were widened, gorges were formed; and as the earth approached the present geological age, the gentler rains only supplied the rivers and lakes which now occupied the furrows ploughed deeply by primeval torrents. The rough work was done, the statue blocked out; and henceforth meteoric influences were merely to finish, add expression and polish to the work. A traveller crossing this territory from ocean to ocean would sometimes follow the river valleys, then climb ridges, again traverse a plain, cross a valley, ride along another mountain-ridge, compassing a volcano, and finally descend abruptly to the Pacific. His direction had not changed, but the nature of his path had been wonderfully transformed.