Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB
[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed]

SUMMARY OF THE METEOROLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS TAKEN IN SEVERAL LOCALITIES OF MEXICO, DURING THE YEAR 1896.

[ocr errors]

The table on page 39 shows the results of the meteorological observations taken in the principal cities of Mexico during the year 1896.

Professor Mariano Barcena, director of our National Meteorological Observatory or Weather Bureau, furnished me the following data about the maximum and minimum of temperature and greatest oscillation both in summer and winter of several cities in Mexico, located both at the sea-level like Merida and Mazatlan, at different altitudes like Jalapa, San Luis Potosi, Oaxaca, and at the highest level like the cities of Mexico, Pachuca, and Zacatecas, showing the mildness of the Mexican climate.

[blocks in formation]

GUANAJUATO (STATE OF GUANAJUATO).

Maximum temperature in the shade in summer..
Maximum temperature in winter...

Minimum temperature in winter .

Greatest oscillation in one day in winter..
Greatest oscillation in one day in summer.

91.9, April.

82.0, February.

[ocr errors]

36.0, January.

36.7
36.7

LEON (STATE OF GUANAJUATO).
Maximum temperature in the shade in summer.
Maximum temperature in winter..

......

91.6, May and June.
77.0, February.

PACHUCA (STATE OF HIDALGO).

Maximum temperature in the shade in summer..............

Maximum temperature in winter.

Minimum temperature in winter...

Greatest oscillation in one day in winter.

Greatest oscillation in one day in summer.

So.2, May.

77.0, December.

32.4, December.

33.3

28.6

[blocks in formation]

Maximum temperature in the shade in summer........ 89.6, April.

Maximum temperature in winter....

Minimum temperature in winter....

....

Greatest oscillation in one day in winter...
Greatest oscillation in one day in summer..

75.7, January.

12.2, February.

32.8

25.6

[blocks in formation]

Although the City of Mexico, on account of its present unsatisfactory sanitary conditions, of which I will treat in speaking of that city and which I am sure will be remedied before long, cannot be considered now as the best place for invalids, there are many other localities in the country presenting great advantages as sanitariums.

The mild nature and evenness of most of our climate is very favorable to certain diseases-especially pulmonary ones-and when that advantage becomes well known the central plateau of Mexico will be the best sanitarium for lung diseases, and especially for tuberculosis. Other lung diseases requiring a warmer climate could find desirable places in certain valleys in the temperate zone like Cuantla, Cuernavaca, Tasco, Iguala, and others. These very conditions, namely, the even and mild climate both in summer and winter, will make it a country visited by thousands of pleasure or health seekers who wish to escape both extremes of the northern climate. Even now we would have a much larger travel from this country if we had convenient accommodations for travellers, but our hotels are not yet as comfortable as those in the United States.

FLORA.

The short and imperfect description of the climate of Mexico, made above, will show that we can raise all the products of the three different zones into which the earth is divided, and the most remarkable thing is that we can raise them almost on the same ground. By going only a few miles, for instance, travelling on horseback four or five hours from a low to a higher locality, we change from the torrid to the temperate zone, and therefore we can have the products of both with comparatively little trouble; and by going four or five hours higher still, we change from the temperate to the frigid zone, and these are advantages of our geographical position which can be appreciated only by those who have experienced them.'

1 Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, editor of Harper's Monthly Magazine, in a brilliant article published in the July, 1897, number of that periodical, gives the following description of the rapid descent from the cold to the temperate and hot regions of Mexico, which may be considered as a specimen of the scenery in many other localities of that country. In many other places, where there are no wagon-roads, but only a footpath, the descent is a great deal more rapid, often 5000 feet in four or five miles, and then the contrast is still greater. At Maltrata for instance, an Indian town about 5000 feet above the level of the sea, the natives offer their tropical fruits to the passengers of the Mexican Railway going from Veracruz to the City of Mexico, and they leave with what they have left after the train starts to climb the mountains to the Central Plateau to an altitude of about 9000 feet, and they reach Esperanza, the first station on the Central Plateau far ahead of the train, which has to describe a long, zigzag course before getting there. I have selected the following extract from Mr. Warner's article because it relates to one of the historical places of Mexico :

Cuernavaca is distinguished as the actual meeting-place of the pine and the palm. It lies only a little more than fifty miles south of the City of Mexico; but in order to reach it there is a mountain to be crossed which is at an elevation of over ten thousand feet. A railway climbs up this mountain, over the summit, to a wind-swept plain, in the midst of pine forests, called Tres Marias-marked by the sightly peaks of the Three Marys. By long loops and zigzags it is crawling down the mountain on

The Mexican Southern Railway, from Puebla to Oaxaca, descends in a few hours, by a series of fertile terraces, from an elevation of seven thousand feet to one of about seventeen hundred and fifty feet, when ths wonderful Cañon de los Cues is reached, a region of cocoa-nuts and bananas. But all the valleys and terraces in March are green or yellow with wheat and corn and sugar-cane. It confuses one's ideas to pass a field of wheat, the green blades just springing from the ground, and then a field ripe for harvest, and then a threshing-floor where the grain is being trodden out by mules. This means that you can plant and reap every day in the year, if you can obtain water in the dry season, and do not wait for the regular and copious summer rains.

The magnificent arboreal vegetation embraces one hundred and fourteen different species of building timber and cabinet woods, including oaks, pines, firs, cedars, mahogany, and rosewood; twelve species. of dyewoods; eight of gum trees: the cacao and india-rubber, copal, liquid-ambar, camphor, turpentine, pine, mezquite yielding a substance the other side to Cuernavaca. Mexico City has an elevation of seven thousand five hundred feet, Tres Marias of about ten thousand, and Cuernavaca of five thousand. The descent by the wagon-road is in length only twelve miles, but the drop in that distance is five thousand feet, so that the traveller passes very quickly from temperate to tropical conditions.

**From the heights Cuernavaca seems to lie in a plain, but it is really on a promontory between two barrancas, and the whole country beyond is broken, till the terraces fall off into more tropical places, where the view is bordered by purple mountains. Indeed, the little city in the midst of this tumultuous plain is surrounded by lofty mountains. The country around, and especially below to the south, is irrigated, and presents a dozen contrasts of color in the evergreen foliage, the ripening yellow crops of sugar-cane and grain, the clusters of big trees here and there about a village or a hacienda, and the frequent church-towers. All this is loveliness, a mixture of temperate and tropical grace, but there is grandeur besides. Looking to the east, say from the Palace of Cortez, over the fields of purple and green and yellow and brown, where the graceful palms place themselves just as an artist would have them in the foreground of his picture, the view is certainly one of the finest in the world. There is in the left the long mountain range with the peaks of Tres Marias, and along the foot of it haciendas and towers, cones of extinct volcanoes and noble rocky promontories. To form the middle-distance mountains come into the picture) sloping together to lead the eye along from one “value” to another, violet, purple, dark or shining as the sun strikes them, while on the left is a noble range of naked precipices of red rock, always startling in color. It is some two thousand feet up the side of one of these red cliffs that there is the remains of an ancient city of Cliff-dwellersalmost inaccessible now, but once the home of a race that understood architecture and knew how to carve. The lines of this natural picture, the fields, the intervening ledges, the lofty mountains, all converge to the spot the artist would choose for the eye to rest, and there, up in the heavens, are the snow-clad peaks of Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, about seventeen thousand five hundred feet above the sea, volcanic creators of the region, and now undisputed lords of the landscape. In the evening these peaks are rosy in the sun; in the morning their white immobility is defined against the rosy sunshine."

« AnteriorContinuar »