ions and public buildings, and
extensive boulevards and parks, and characteristic social, literary,
and commercial life, the City of Mexico may be described as
Americo-Parisian, and it is rapidly becoming a centre of attraction for
United States tourists, who, avid of historical and foreign colour,
descend thither in Pullman-car loads from the north. The city lies some
three miles from the shore of Lake Texcoco, which, with that of Chalco
and others, forms a group of salt- and fresh-water lagoons in the
strange Valley of Mexico. At the time of the Conquest the city stood
upon an island, connected with the mainland by the remarkable stone
causeways upon which the struggles between the Spaniards and the Aztecs
took place, during the siege of the city at the time of the Conquest.
But these lakes, after the manner of other bodies of water, generally,
in the high elevations of the American Cordilleras--Titicaca, in Peru,
to wit--are gradually perishing by evaporation, their waters
diminishing century by century. The Valley of Mexico, however, of
recent years has received an artificial hydrographic outlet in the
famous drainage canal and tunnel, which conducts the overflow into a
tributary of the Panuco river, and so to the Gulf of Mexico.

The Valley of Mexico is surrounded by volcanic hills, forming a more
recent formation of the Andine folds, of which the Sierra Madres
compose the Mexican Cordilleras. We have now to cross this, for our
faces are set towards the Pacific Ocean. We ascend and pass the Western
Sierra Madre, the _divortia aquarum_ of the Pacific watershed, leaving
the intra-montane plateau of Anahuac and the _mesa central_ behind us.
Again the climate changes as the downward journey is begun, and again
the _tierra caliente_ is approached. The culminating peaks--the
beautiful Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl--sink now below the eastern
horizon, but as we journey to the west Colima's smoking cone will rise
before the view. The descent from the highlands to the west coast is
even more rapid than to the east, and the temperate climate of the
valleys, and the bitter cold of the early morning on the uplands, soon
give place to tropical conditions. Extensive forests of oak and pine,
clothing the sides of the canyons and _barrancas_ of the high Sierra
Madre, are succeeded by the profuse vegetation of the torrid zone. Down
in the soft regions of the west, where tropical agriculture yields its
plentiful and easily-won harve