viii Untrofcuctiou. 



neighboring Guatemalan Indians, encouraged, I was sure, although I 

 could not prove it, by President Barrios, under the plea that I was 

 making it in Guatemalan territory. 



My sudden departure from Soconusco made me abandon and lose 

 everything I had there. I, therefore, did not see grown the trees I had 

 planted, but they grew well and yielded a large amount of fruit, of 

 which a relative of mine availed himself, who made out of that plan- 

 tation a large fortune, and finally bought from me the land occupied 

 by the plantation at about the price of land there when the purchase 

 was made. 



In the several trips of inspection which I made in Mexico, I was 

 careful to study coffee culture in every district I visited, and I pub- 

 lished in the newspapers the result of my studies in the shape of 

 articles relating to each district. They were finally reprinted in a 

 book on the State of Oaxaca, which I published in Barcelona in 1886. 

 It would take a great deal of space to publish them here, and they do- 

 not contain, so far as rules for coffee culture are concerned, any more 

 information than appears in my manual on the subject. 



As Mexico is so little known in the United States, I thought it con- 

 venient for the benefit of the readers in this country that I should pre- 

 cede my manual with another paper on " Geographical and Statistical 

 Notes on Mexico," which I have just published, and which to an 

 American reader gives more recent information than I have seen col- 

 lected in any single book in the English language. 



WASHINGTON, January 31, 1898. M. R. 



MONEY, WEIGHTS AND MEASURES. 



Before Mexico adopted the metric decimal system we used the old 

 Spanish weights and measures. 



The measures used in this book are those in vogue in Soconusca 

 when this manual was written, namely : the vara as a unit of linear 

 measure, which is 2.75 English feet or about 33 inches ; and for land 

 measure the Cuerda, which is a square of 25 varas on each side or 625 

 sq. varas, the Caballeria, which has 609.408 varas or 105} acres and 

 the square league which is a square of 5,000 varas on each side or 

 25,000,000 sq. varas and equal to 4339.4 acres. The pounds are also 

 the Mexican pounds equal to 1.014 English pounds. 



The Mexican dollar was divided into eight parts, each of them 

 called a real. The real, which was 12^ cents, was divided into two 

 halves called medios, and each media was divided into two halves called 

 cuartillas, and each cuartilla was divided into two halves called octavos, 



In Mexico we use the thermometer with the Centigrade scale, and 

 the way in which this scale can be reduced to the Fahrenheit scale 

 used in this country is well known. 



