Every land upon this globe owes to nature that predetermination of its products and its needs which are the vital factors of its commerce and its industries. Even the nature of its races, which has so much to do with the standards of living which affect the quality and volume of business, is determined to a certain extent by climate and geography. It is therefore a fundamental need of all who have a deep interest in Mexican business to grasp something of the location, the formation, and the climate of that country. For few nations in the world have a more wonderful location, and few have a more disastrous climate. The vast cornucopia-like triangle of land which comprises the territory of Mexico lies south of nearly three-quarters of the southern boundary of the United States. Its western tip touches Southern California at the Pacific and its most easterly point is 500 miles south of the Pensacola, at the western end of Florida. For 1,833 miles Mexico’s northern border is contiguous to the United States, 693 miles eastward along arbitrarily marked lines from the Pacific Ocean to El Paso, Texas, and the remainder southeastward along the sinuous course of the Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico. Its jagged southern border is hardly 400 miles long, touching Guatemala and British Honduras (Belize). This cornucopia, grasping the Gulf of Mexico on the east like a great hand, swings southeastward from the Pacific contact with the United States until the most westerly point of the Guatemalan border is 500 miles _east_ of Mexico’s easternmost contact with the United States on the north. Set apart, as Mexico is by her boundaries, she seems in form much like a great peninsula, but she has, herself, two important peninsulas as part of her territorial extent and configuration. One is the Peninsula of Yucatan, which forms the eastern end of the cornucopia, the thumb of the curving hand which grasps the Gulf of Mexico, an area of about 50,000 square miles. The other is the long, narrow peninsula of Lower California, with 58,343 square miles, extending directly south of the American state of California and connected with the Mexican mainland by only a narrow strip.