It seemed to me worth while
to make some remarks about this question, with a view of showing that
the theory as to the relation between food and population, though
partly true, is not wholly so; and that in the region of which we have
been speaking it can be clearly shown to fail.

After spending a long morning with the Indians and their _cura_, we
took quite an affectionate leave of them. Their last words were an
apology for making us pay threepence apiece for the pineapples which we
loaded our horses with. In the season, they said, twelve for sixpence
is the price, but the fruit was scarce and dear as yet.

Our companion, besides being engaged in the Orizaba cotton-mill, was
one of the owners of the sugar-hacienda of the Potrero, below Cordova,
and we all rode down there together from the Indian village, and spent
the evening in walking about the plantation, and inspecting the new
machinery and mills. It was a pleasant sight to see the people coming
to the well with their earthen jars, after their work was done, in an
unceasing procession, laughing and chattering. They were partly Indian,
but with a considerable admixture of negro blood, for many black slaves
were brought into the country in old times by the Spanish planters.
Now, of course, they and their descendants are free, and the hotter
parts of Mexico are the paradise of runaway slaves from Louisiana and
Texas; for, so far from their race being despised, the Indian women
seek them as husbands, liking their liveliness and good humour better
than the quieter ways of their own countrymen. Even Europeans settled
in Mexico sometimes take wives of negro blood.

I have never noticed in any country so large a number of mixed races,
whose parentage is indicated by their features and complexion. In
Europe, the parent races are too nearly alike for the children of such
mixed marriages to be strikingly different from either parent. In
America and the West Indies we are familiar with the various mixtures
of white and negro, mulatto, quadroon, &c.; but in Mexico we have three
races, Spanish, pure Mexican, and Negro, which, with their
combinations, make a list of twenty-five varieties of the human race,
distinguishable from one another, and with regular names, which Mayer
gives in his work on Mexico, such as _mulatto, mestizo, zambo, chino_,
and so forth. Here all the brown Mexican Indians are taken as one race,
and the Red Indians of the frontier-states are not included at