THE KINGDOM OF GUATEMALA. 
21 
warded the preceding year through twenty-six offices. 
In 1882 the total attendance at the national schools was 
only five thousand, or less than eight per cent of the 
whole population. The annual grant for the purposes of 
education was $50,000. 
The Mosquito coast cuts from Nicaragua a large por¬ 
tion of her shore-line, precisely as British Honduras robs 
Guatemala of hers; and this has been a cause of serious 
trouble. This territory, which is about forty miles wide, 
had been under the protection of Great Britain from 1655 
to 1850, when that very un-American document the Clay- 
ton-Bulwer treaty gave England certain rights in her col¬ 
ony of Belize in exchange for such claims as she had to 
this coast, and by the treaty of Managua, in 1860, she 
formally ceded her protectorate to Nicaragua; but there 
are still several disputed points. 
Costa Rica. -— The fifth and most southern republic of 
Central America has an area of only twenty-one thousand 
square miles. The Atlantic coast is low, and the country 
is covered with a dense forest, while the Pacific slope is 
characterized by wide savannas, or llanuras . Between 
these borders are high volcanoes and an elevated table¬ 
land three to four thousand feet above the sea, — the 
latter almost the only cultivated land in the State. The 
forests are largely composed of very valuable trees,— 
mahogany, ebony, brazil-wood, and oak; and the usual 
tropical fruits grow well. Coffee, however, is the staple 
export, being grown extensively in the neighborhood of 
San Jose and Cartago; the soil most favorable being dark 
volcanic ash, from three to eighteen feet deep. The 
amount exported in 1874 was valued at $4,464,000; in- 
1885 the amount is placed at $4,219,617. 
