Every schoolboy knows of Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond in bonnie Scotland, and most people are familiar with the location of Lago di Como, in Italy. And yet I should not be surprised if fair-sized towns could be found in the United States where no one could tell whether such a body of water as Lake Chapala existed or not. As a matter of fact it is ten times as large as all the lakes of Northern Italy combined; and it embraces islands larger than the entire surface of Loch Lomond. Its steely blue waters and rugged shores need only the magic pen of the novelist or poet to tell of its beauties and invest each nook and glen with romance, and the charming villas of Como to make Chapala as picturesque and fascinating as those better known lakes. It is almost a hundred miles long and thirty-three miles wide at the widest point, and covers fourteen hundred square miles. Patzcuaro and Cuitzeo are also lakes of considerable size near Chapala, and all of them are six thousand feet or more above sea level. They only await development and advertising to become popular resorts. The vast majority of the inhabitants of Mexico are descendants of Indian races who were found there by the Spanish conquerors, and mixtures of those natives with European settlers. Of the fourteen millions of inhabitants only about nineteen per cent. are white; of the remainder, forty-three per cent. are Indians and thirty-eight per cent. mixed. There is a greater resemblance of the Mexican Indians to the Malay races of Asia than to the American Indians. Their intensely black hair and eyes, brown complexion, small stature, and even a slight obliquity of the eyes bear a strong resemblance to the Japanese. I have seen it stated that, if a Japanese is dressed in Mexican costume, and a Mexican in Japanese dress, it is difficult to tell which is the Jap and which the Mexican. Students of languages say that there is a strong similarity between the Mexican tongues and oriental languages. The different tribes do not mingle much and seldom intermarry, and this fact may contribute to their physical deterioration. [Illustration: AN INDIAN MAIDEN]