influence on commercial industry and intellectual cultivation. The importance of the inland Caribbean Sea, bounded by Venezuela on the south, will be further augmented by the progressive increase of population on the banks of the Mississippi; for that river, the Rio del Norte and the Magdalena are the only great navigable streams which the Caribbean Sea receives. The depth of the American rivers, their immense branches, and the use of steam-boats, everywhere facilitated by the proximity of forests, will, to a certain extent, compensate for the obstacles which the uniform line of the coasts and the general configuration of the continent oppose to the progress of industry and civilization. On comparing the extent of the territory with the absolute population, we obtain the result of the connection of those two elements of public prosperity, a connection that constitutes the relative population of every state in the New World. We shall find to every square sea league, in Mexico, 90; in the United States, 58; in the republic of Columbia, 30; and in Brazil, 15 inhabitants; while Asiatic Russia furnishes 11; the whole Russian Empire, 87; Sweden with Norway, 90; European Russia, 320; Spain, 763; and France, 1778. But these estimates of relative population, when applied to countries of immense extent, and of which a great part is entirely uninhabited, merely furnish mathematical abstractions of but little value. In countries uniformly cultivated--in France, for example--the number of inhabitants to the square league, calculated by separate departments, is in general only a third, more or less, than the relative population of the sum of all the departments. Even in Spain the deviations from the average number rise, with few exceptions, only from half to double. In America, on the contrary, it is only in the Atlantic states, from South Carolina to New Hampshire, that the population begins to spread with any uniformity. In that most civilized portion of the New World, from 130 to 900 inhabitants are reckoned to the square league, while the relative population on all the Atlantic states, considered together, is 240. The extremes (North Carolina and Massachusetts) are only in the relation of 1 to 7, nearly as in France, where the extremes, in the departments of the Hautes Alpes and the Cote-du-Nord are also in the relation of 1 to 6.7. The variations from the average number, which we generally find restricted to narrow limits in the civilized countries of Europe, exceed all measure in Brazil, in the Spanish colonies and even in the confederation of the United States, in its whole extent. We find in Mexico in some of the intendencias, for example, La Sonora and Durango, from 9 to 15 inhabitants to the square league, while in others, on the central table-land, there are more than 500. The relative population of the country situated between the eastern bank of the Mississippi and the Atlantic states is scarcely 47; while that of Connecticut, Rhode