bamba were rich in cereal wealth, unsalable when the crop was too great for home consumption; not a valley or mountain side but gave agricultural, medicinal, and other products, such as commanded ready sale in any foreign market; sixty-five kinds of rare and beautiful cabinet woods stood untouched by man in the great virgin forests of the north and east. The mountains were weighted down with silver, copper, tin, and other metals, and the people gazing upon a wealth sufficient to pay the national debts of the world, and yet unavailable for lack of means of communication. There was abundant evidence that not a river that carried its waters from Bolivia to the Amazon but washed through auriferous deposits as rich as any in California or Australia, and for lack of power to take machinery to them they did not produce to exceed £60,000 per annum, where they should have produced millions.
While the facilities for transportation have considerably improved since the above was written, the vast natural wealth of Bolivia, embracing as it does the choicest products of all latitudes, is still largely unavailable, because, under existing conditions, her products, other than high-grade minerals and coca, can not be profitably exported.
The range of production in Bolivia extends from the purely tropical region to that of perpetual snow and ice.
The learned Dr. Agustin Aspiazu, of La Paz, in his "La Meseta de los Andes," divides the country into four zones of production, namely, the torrid, temperate, frigid, and glacial, each having its own flora and fauna. In the article descriptive of the resources of Bolivia, heretofore referred to as appearing in the Report of the Statistician of the Department of Agriculture (No. 89, New Series, 1891), the zones of plant production are correctly described as extending from "the purely tropical of the lowlands through the subtropical of the lower valleys, the temperature of the valley heads and lower plateaus, and the subarctic of the punas to the arctic of the punas bravas and the regions of perpetual snow and ice," and are therefore marked by climates of elevation rather than extent.
The climatic scale suggested by Dr. Agustin Aspiazu[1] furnishes perhaps as convenient a basis for the classification of the total
- ↑ See cut. p. 20.
