AN ECONOMIC STUDY OF MEXICO. 301 



case of the former is local and not climatic, and is due to the circum- 

 stance that the site of the city is " a bowl in the mountains," so that 

 drainage from it is now, and always has been, very difficult. And, as 

 years have passed, and the population living within the bowl has 

 multiplied, the evil has continually increased, until Lake Tezcoco, 

 which borders the city, and on which Cortes built and floated war- 

 galleys, has been nearly filled up with drainage deposits which have 

 been carried into it through an elaborate system of city sewers. If 

 these sewers ever had fall enough to drain them, they have, as the 

 result of the filling up of this lake, little or none now, and the result 

 is that they have become in effect an immense system of cess-pools ; 

 while the soil, on which from 250,000 to 300,000 people live, has be- 

 come permeated throughout with stagnant water and filth inexpressible. 

 And were it not for the extreme dryness and rarefaction of the air, 

 which, as before pointed out, prevent the putrefaction of animal sub- 

 stances, and seem to hinder the propagation of the germs of disease, 

 the city must long ago have been visited with plague, and perhaps 

 have been rendered absolutely uninhabitable. And, even under exist- 

 ing circumstances, the average duration of life in the city of Mexico 

 is estimated to be but 26*4 years. Typhoid fever prevails all the year 

 round, and is especially virulent at the end of the dry season, when 

 the heat is the greatest. And, surprising as it may seem, with a cli- 

 mate of perpetual spring and an elevation of 7,500 above the sea-level, 

 lung and malarial diseases hold a prominent place among the causes of 

 death. According to the reports of the Board of Health of the Mexi- 

 can capital for April and May of the present year (1886), thirty-three 

 per cent of the weekly mortality at that season was to be referred to 

 typhoid and other forms of gastric fever, and twenty per cent to con- 

 sumption and pneumonia. In the year 1877, when a typhus epidemic 

 prevailed, the city's mortality was reported to have been as high as 

 53-2 per thousand as compared with an average death-rate of 24*6 in 

 Paris for the same year. " A distinguished member of the medical 

 faculty of Mexico has lately published a report, in which he demon- 

 strates, by comparative statistical tables, that the annual mortality 

 of the city is increasing to such an extent as already to counterbalance 

 the natural movement of the population, and, if not checked in time, 

 as threatening the race."* "United States Consular Reports," No. 3, 

 1881, p. 18. 



This condition of affairs is not due, as some might infer, to any 

 improvidence or want of enterprise on the part of the Mexicans, for 



* Under the title of the " Great Necropolis," one of the prominent Mexican newspapers, 

 the " Correo del Lunes," recently said : " Undisguised terror is caused by these proces- 

 sions of the dead which daily defile through the streets of Mexico. To be alive here is 

 getting to be a startling phenomenon. It may be a very short time, unless energetic 

 remedial measures are adopted, before the capital will have to be moved to another 

 location." 



