Especial attention is called to the map of Mexico published as a supplement to this issue of the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE. It contains the latest and most accurate information of the geography of the country, and also gives the transportation routes open and in prospect, as well as the contours of altitude. The map is the highest example of the cartographer's art that has been produced with Mexico as its subject. Additional copies of the map may be obtained from the offices of the National Geographic Society. Price, 50 cents each; mounted on linen, $1. P ERHAPS nowhere else in the world is there a country so full of、 contrast as Mexico. With university established before John Harvard, Elihu Yale, or William and Mary were born, the masses of its people are hopelessly ignorant. With a hospital founded before Jamestown was even dreamed of, it is one of the most backward regions of the earth in a medical way. With natural riches greater than those of a thousand Midas's, its masses are just as poor as the proverbial church mouse. With a constitution as perfect as any organic law in the civilized world, it is a nation whose rulers always have been a law unto themselves. Effigies of Judas Iscariot-to be burned, crunched, exploded, or hanged by the neck until dead-may be bought in the same stores that sell the latest creations of the dressmakers' and the milliners' arts from Paris. A bull ring, built of American steel and concrete, stands within earshot of the Republic's leading hotel, and the sound of the perfervid cheering of the sun-gods as they applaud their favorite matador when he executes a brilliant pass, and the band responds with the Diana, may be waited into the very precincts of the American Embassy itself. Here you will see a Mexican halfbreed, barefooted, wearing a dollar pair of trousers, a fifty-cent shirt, and a tendollar sombrero. There, at a single glance and within the length of a single city block, you may see an Indian cargador, a donkey, an ox-cart, a carriage, a railroad train, a street-car, and an automobile— almost every type of locomotion since Adam. WIDE CLIMATIC RANGE You may tread the burning sands of a tropical desert with the wet of the perpetual snow of towering mountains still upon your shoes. You may take a single railway journey of 36 hours in which the people you see at the railroad station will be dressed in four different weights of clothing. Land of the inordinately rich and of the abjectly poor; land of the aboriginal Indian and of the twentieth-century business man; land of perpetual snow and of A VARIETY OF CACTUS WHICH IS A SOURCE OF MUCH ANNOYANCE TO STOCK AND TO RIDERS IN CHIHUAHUA, MEXICO Any part of the bush will come away freely, and a slight touch will serve to attach almost any amount of such cactus to the person. The process of removal is usually long and painful. unending summer-everywhere you turn there is contrast, high lights and deep shadows. Fitting indeed is Ober's beautiful apostrophe to this wonderful region: "Mexico lies at the meeting-place of two zones-the Temperate and the Torrid-and from its geographical position, combined with its altitudes, possesses a greater variety of soil, surface, and vegetation than any equal area of contiguous territory in the world. Basking in the sunshine of the tropics, her head pillowed in the lap of the North, her feet resting at the gateway of the continents, her snowy bosom rising to the clouds, she rests serene in the majesty of her might. She guards vast treasures of gold and silver; emeralds and opals adorn her brow; while the hem of her royal robes, dipped in the seas of two hemispheres, is embroidered in pearls and the riches of the sea. "Mother of western civilization! Cradle of the American race! A thousand years have been gathered into the sheaf of time since her first cities were built. When the Norsemen coasted our western shores she had villages and towns, white-walled temples, and spreading palaces. When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, a hundred years already had passed since the soldiers of Cortés had battled with the hosts of Montezuma. In no country in the world can you pass so rapidly from the blazing shores of the heated tropics to the region of perpetual winter, from the land of the palm and the vine to the land of the lichen and the pine.' ONE-FOURTH AS LARGE AS THE UNITED STATES Mexico has an area approximately onefourth of that of the United States, a |