"Thus the poor laborer, his earning capacity cut down by his disease, with employment which is at best very irregular, with his sick wife and children for whom he has to buy 'iron tonics' that cost all that he can rake and scrape together, without money for clothes, much less for shoes, with a palm-bark hut not too well protected against the damp cold of the grove in which he lives, with not a scrap of furniture save, perhaps, a hammock, and, worst of all, with a miserable diet lacking in proteids and fats, lives from day to day, saving nothing, knowing nothing of the world beyond his plantation, working mechanically simply because he is not the drone he has been too frequently painted outside of Porto Rico, but without any object save to keep on living as generations have done before him. It has been our experience that when he is asked 'Why have you sought our dispensary?' the answer has almost invariably been, 'Because I can no longer work.' The _jíbaro_, nevertheless, has ever been the lever which has raised the bank account of Porto Rico, and with an average of 40 per cent of hemoglobin and two and a half millions of red corpuscles per cubic millimeter he has labored from sun to sun in the coffee plantation of the mountains, in the sugar estate of the coast land, and in the tobacco field of the foothills, in addition to his personal coöperation in other industries and commercial enterprises. He is a sick man and deserves our highest respect, and merits our most careful attention as a vital element in the economic life of the island. The American people should take seriously into account his future, which is at present anything but promising." OVERPOPULATION WHEN we say that a country is overpopulated we speak in relative terms, inasmuch as the overpopulation of a country does not depend upon the density of the population alone, but also upon the ability of that country to produce a sufficient amount of foodstuffs to maintain its population. Thus a country which has a relatively small population and a still smaller ability to produce foodstuffs would be more overpopulated than a country of similar size with a larger population and a still greater production of foodstuffs. In considering the case of Porto Rico, we find that the Island contains 8,317 square kilometers of land. The estimated population at the present time is 1,200,000. This gives about 140 persons to the square kilometer as compared with 72 persons in France, 237 persons in Belgium, and 252 in Saxony. If the productive ability of the soil of Porto Rico is as great as that of Belgium and Saxony, we must conclude that Porto Rico is not overpopulated. If for any reason it is less, then the extent of overpopulation increases directly as the soil grows less in productive ability.