was dredged so that fruit boats could enter and go to the docks of banana farms, encouraging a promising industry which was killed by heavy taxation and government neglect of the dredging, under the revolutionary presidents of recent years. But this one system of rivers offers virtually all there is of navigation in Mexico. Yucatan, the peninsula which separates the Caribbean sea from the Gulf of Mexico, is virtually without rivers, the water from the abundant rainfall of its interior finding its way to underground streams in the porous underlying coral limestone. On the west coast there are a few rivers. The most important is the Lerma, which waters a large territory on the Pacific side of the continental divide, and allows some local transportation. The Balsas, in the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, reaches far inland, but rapids and shallows make its use for navigation expensive and all but impossible. In Sonora is the Yaqui river, navigable for small boats and of some value for transportation. The Fuerte is also in this class. Another phase of the geography of Mexico which affects transportation is the complete absence of good natural harbors well located. The chief port of Mexico, Vera Cruz, has a harbor which was built artificially around a partially protected bay. Tampico is a port solely because of the jetties which narrow the mouth of the Panuco and, with the help of dredges, keep the channel clear. Puerto Mexico has a similar problem, but the smaller river makes dredging absolutely vital. Frontera is solely a dredging proposition, as the Usumacinta and the Grijalva, emptying together into the Gulf, have formed a vast delta in the lowlands which can probably never be narrowed to take advantage of the great volume of water which they pour out. Yucatan has literally no semblance of a harbor, and its great crops of sisal hemp are loaded from lighters at appalling expense. On the Pacific coast, Acapulco has one of the ideal harbors of the world, completely landlocked, and open for medium-draft ships. But it is relatively small, and moreover as yet almost inaccessible to any railway survey, although it was used by the galleons from Manila as a port for trans-shipment of the treasures of the Orient across Mexico to the galleons from Cadiz which came to Vera Cruz. Salina Cruz, the Pacific terminus of the Tehuantepec National Railway, was built from an open roadstead with two lines of jetties and seawalls, a work which inattention has now all but ruined. Manzanillo, the terminus of the only direct railway line from Mexico City to the Pacific, was also built with seawalls and opened by dredges. Mazatlan, further up the coast, and the chief port of the Southern Pacific Railway of Mexico, is an open roadstead. Guaymas, the port of the state of Sonora, is accessible only to light-draft ships.