“Chile,” which, by a curious coincidence, had about the same significance in the Inca language that our word “chilly” has in English, is the name that was originally given by the Incas to that part of the Pacific slope of the Andes which lies beyond the river Maule, the southern boundary of their great empire. At the time of the Spanish conquest, the first Governor, Pedro de Valdivia, dubbed it “Nueva Estremadura,” after his native province in Spain, and so called it in his official communications, yet not only did the Inca name cling to the country south of the Maule but soon it was popularly applied to that in the north as well, as far up as Peru. And so when, some years afterward (says the historian Rosales), the Emperor Charles V of Germany, who was also King of Spain, was negotiating the marriage of his son Philip with Mary, Queen of England, and was told that, being a sovereign in her own right, she would enter into such an alliance only with a reigning monarch, he caused Philip to be crowned King of Chile and Naples, and thus incidentally, in distinguishing the province above his other American possessions, confirmed its original name, and Chile it has been called ever since. The territory of the present republic consists of a strip of land of most extraordinary conformation lying between the main Cordillera of the Andes and the sea. It has an average width of less than a hundred miles, yet stretches for nearly three thousand miles from a point in the tropics considerably above the center of the continent, clear down to Cape Horn, crossing thirty-eight degrees of latitude and embracing an area of nearly 291,500 square miles. A strip of the same length in North America would reach from Key West to northern Labrador, or, if measured along the Rocky Mountains, from Mexico to the Yukon in Alaska. Reckoned in square miles, it is larger than any country in Europe except Russia, though it has a population, according to the last census (1907), of only 3,254,451—less than that of the city and suburbs of Paris or of New York. In foreign commerce Chile ranks third among the South American republics. In 1910 it amounted in value to $228,604,198.64. The principal exports are silver, copper, nitrates, borax, sulphur, vegetable products, wines and liquors. Her exchange of commerce with the United States amounted to $38,050,652.