ECUADOR Ecuador, “the Switzerland of America,” is one of the smallest of our sister republics in the South, yet her area, of 116,000 square miles, is equal to that of our States of Missouri and Arkansas combined, and, if certain pending boundary disputes should be determined in her favor, her territory would be more than doubled. Her population is now about 1,500,000, an average of a little over twelve to the square mile. Politically, the republic is divided into sixteen provinces, not including the Galápagos Islands. Five are maritime, occupying the strip of coast between the Western Cordillera and the sea, ten are interandine, and then there is the Oriente, so called, which consists of all the country embraced in the slope between the Eastern Cordillera and the Brazilian frontier, in the valley of the Amazon. There are two fluvial systems, both rising in the mountains; one flowing west to the sea and the other down the eastern slope. In all they are composed of ninety-one rivers. Those tributary to the Guayas, flowing westward to the sea, and many of which are of considerable size, are now of the greater commercial importance because the country of the Oriente, through which those tributary to the Amazon flow, is still a wilderness, only sparsely inhabited even by what are left of the aborigines—and this although it is the richest of all in vegetation and fertility of soil, like the adjoining Montaña district of Peru. Thus, ranging as it does from the sea-level of the coast on one side and the valley of the Amazon on the other to the high interandine plateau, and from thence to the great cloud-piercing peaks of the cordilleras, crowned with perpetual snow, this country directly beneath the Equator, from which it derives its very name, is possessed, as are Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia, of every variety of climate within the sphere of a few hours’ journey—in the lowlands, the eternal summer of the tropics; on the high table-lands, eternal spring, and, in the glacial regions of the mountain summits, winter without end. As the late Professor Orton so aptly put it: “As the Ecuadorian sees all the constellations of the firmament, so nature surrounds him with representatives of every family of plants. Tropical, temperate and arctic fruits and flowers are here found in profusion, or could be successfully cultivated. There are places where the eye can embrace an entire zone, for it may look up to a wheat or barley field or potato patch and down to the sugar cane and pineapple.”