1913-] HIGHEST NATIVE AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. 473 



country, lying in low, isolated valleys or basins such as Zacapa, and 

 highlands where pine or temperate forests prevail. The bush country 

 is unimportant, being of small area. In some places it is so hot and 

 dry that cacti and mesquite bushes make it look like the lowlands of 

 Arizona. It is fairly well inhabited and moderately healthful. The 

 people are in advance of the poor denizens of the forest zone but 

 are miserably inefficient, idle, weak-willed, and immoral. The real 

 strength of Guatemala is in the highlands, where the vegetation takes 

 on an aspect suggestive of the temperate zone. There, on the 

 plateau amid pine-clad hills at an altitude of 4,000 to 8,000 feet, all 

 the large towns are now located. The conditions of health, from 

 a tropical point of view, are everywhere good. Typhus, dysentery 

 and other disorders, to be sure, often sweep the country ; and faces 

 pitted by smallpox are frequently seen. These diseases, however, 

 although causing a high death rate, are temporary. Their ravages 

 are as nothing compared with those of the deadly malarial fevers 

 which in the lowland forests return season after season to blight and 

 destroy the same places and the same people. From the coast up- 

 ward, according to universal testimony, the health, energy, industry, 

 and thrift of the native Guatemalans in general show an increase. 

 It seems a curious reversal of what we are wont to call normal con- 

 ditions, when one sees rich, fertile plains along the coast almost 

 uninhabited, then finds the population fairly dense on steeply slop- 

 ing, stony mountain sides at altitudes of three to five thousand feet, 

 and finally on the hilly plateau at 8,000 feet sees little thatched 

 houses clustering thickly everywhere, and every available bit of land 

 almost as carefully and industriously cultivated as in China. Even 

 more curious, perhaps, is the fact that here where the population is 

 now so dense there are relatively few important ruins and none 

 of the advanced type found in Peten. There is no reason to think 

 that ruins which once existed have disappeared to any greater 

 extent than has happened in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Rome, or any 

 other country where a high civilization in the past has been followed 

 by a dense population at present. Moreover ruins of a certain kind 

 are found in considerable numbers, but they are insignificant and 

 probably of late date compared with those of Peten. The carved 



