Nor should we, in this respect, underrate the advantages of the Panama route. The distance from ocean to ocean is only forty-eight miles, against one hundred and fifteen at Nicaragua, and two hundred and twelve at Tehuantepec, and neither hills nor rocks oppose any obstacle that could not be overcome by the conqueror of Suez. Yet there remains a consideration which in connection with the result of other comparisons must leave a preponderance of arguments in favor of Nicaragua. For three fifths of the year the valley of the Rio Chagres is a reeking hotbed of malaria,[B] and from Aspinwall to Panama only dreary sandhills alternate with festering swamps. Nicaragua, on the other hand, is the healthiest region between Chili and California, and offers scenic attractions absolutely unequaled in any other part of the New World, and which can hardly have been surpassed when the Mediterranean peninsulas were still clad in the glory of their primeval forests. I visited the lake region of Nicaragua in 1875, after having seen California, the West Indies, and the highlands of Mexico, and only here I relinquished my doubt that the international park of Switzerland had, after all, a transatlantic rival. The harbor of San Juan is nearly a thousand miles from anything an Anglo-American would call civilization, and since their Walker and Spalding experiences the natives are, on the whole, rather inclined to dispense with the patronage of enterprising foreigners; but, for all that, the time is near when the islands of Lake Nicaragua will be studded with international hotels. The luxuriance of the tropical hill forests is equaled in the mountains of Oaxaca; the climate is not superior to that of the northern Antilles; but the scenery of the highlands, with their fourteen active volcanoes, would turn the scales. Of the forty-six craters in the maritime Cordilleras, five are eruptive and nine smouldering and smoking volcanoes, besides a score of _infernillos_—smoking caves and fissures, opening in the rocks of the foothills, as if the obstruction of the roof-chimneys had forced the subterranean fires to break a vent through the basement of the Sierra. And, moreover, these craters are, with few exceptions, of easy access from both sides of the mountains, and at all seasons of the year. The climate of Nicaragua enjoys the advantages of the real tropics. In the western hemisphere that term is as ambiguous as the “beginning of spring.” At Brownsville, Texas, nearly twelve hundred miles further south than Naples, I have seen snowstorms that would appall a Shetlander; and even in Mexico frosts are not confined to the upper tablelands. But the traveler who reaches the fourteenth parallel has left the winter zone behind. In Leon, near the northwest end of the lake system, he will find butterflies in December, and when he sits down to his Christmas dinner of sweetmeats and broiled bananas, mine host will introduce a _caza-moscas_, or fly-brush boy.