To us the most interesting question about the Mexican Indians of this district was this, Why are there so few of them? There are five thousand square leagues in the State of Vera Cruz, and about fifty inhabitants to the square league.  Now, let us consider half the State, which is at a low level above the sea, as too hot and unhealthy for men to flourish in, and suppose the whole population concentrated on the other half, which lies upon the rising ground from three thousand to six thousand feet above the sea.  This is not very far from the truth, and gives us one hundred inhabitants to the square league—­about one-sixth of the population of the plains of Puebla, in a climate which may be compared to that of North Italy, and where the chief products are maize and European grain.

In the district of the lower temperate region, which we are now speaking of, nature would seem to have done everything to encourage the formation of a dense population.  In the lower part of this favoured region the banana grows.  This plant requires scarcely any labour in its cultivation; and, according to the most moderate estimate, taking an acre of wheat against an acre of bananas, the bananas will support twenty times as many people as the wheat.  Though it is a fruit of sweet, rather luscious taste, and only acceptable to us Europeans as one small item of our complicated diet, the Indians who have been brought up in the districts where it flourishes can live almost entirely upon it, just as the inhabitants of North Africa live upon dates.

In the upper portion of this district, where the banana no longer flourishes, nutritious plants produce an immense yield with easy cultivation.  The yucca which produces cassava, rice, the sweet potato, yams, all flourish here, and maize produces 200 to 300 fold.  According to the accepted theory among political economists, where the soil produces with slight labour an abundant nutriment for man, there we ought to find a teeming population, unless other counteracting causes are to be found.

The history of the country, as far as we can get at it, indicates a movement in the opposite direction.  Judging from the numerous towns the Spanish invaders found in the district, the numbers of armed men they could raise, and the abundance of provisions, we must reckon the population at that time to have been more dense than at present; and the numerous ruins of Indian settlements that exist in the upper temperate region are unquestionable evidence of the former existence of an agricultural people, perhaps ten times as numerous as at present.  The ruins of their fortifications and temples are still to be seen in great numbers, and the soil all over large districts is full of the remains of their pottery and weapons.

How far these settlements were depopulated by wars before the Spanish Conquest, it is not easy to say.  During the Conquest itself they did not offer much resistance to the European invaders, and consequently they escaped the wholesale destruction which fell upon the more patriotic inhabitants of the higher regions.  Since that time the country has been peaceable enough; and even since the Mexican Independence, the wars and revolutions which have done so much injury to the inhabitants of the plateaus have not been much felt here.