18. Quira.—Tough, close-grained, heavy; different colors, from light brown to very dark; very high; from one to three and one-half feet in diameter; plentiful; used in house-building.
19. Madrono Fino.—Like box; one and one-half foot in diameter; excellent wood for turning.
Mr. Loyd gives a list of ninety-five varieties of woods, of which list the above are the most valuable.
GEOLOGY.
A mere enumeration of the geological specimens, which is all that present knowledge upon this subject will permit, is not thought desirable in this paper. Speculations and theories, if not premature, would be out of place.
The physical geography of Central America is the proper subject for a treatise. We have already seen how the table-lands of Guatemala, from four to five thousand feet above the level of the sea, sink to an insignificant height at Panama and Nicaragua. “There is no spot on the globe,” says Humboldt, “so full of volcanoes as this part of America, between 11° and 13° of latitude.”
Two or three volcanoes, Fuego and Agua, in the State of Guatemala, are 14,000 and 12,000 feet high. Some of the volcanoes of Nicaragua reach a height of 7,000 feet. A common and remarkable characteristic of all of them is, that they rise in a conical form from the plain.
| GOLD. | SILVER. | BOTH METALS. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1804 to 1848 | $8,800,000 | $4,400,000 | $13,200,000 |
| 1848 to 1868 | 5,000,000 | 3,000,000 | 8,000,000 |
| Total | $13,800,000 | $7,400,000 | $21,200,000 |
The mines of the Provinces of Panama and the Veraguas are not worked so extensively as they deserve to be. A small quantity of gold is annually produced in the Republics of Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and San Salvador. The Costa Rican mint, in 1852, coined between fifty and one hundred thousand dollars annually. The actual gold product is estimated at ten times this amount. The most important mines in new Granada (Colombia) are found in the State of Antioquia. In 1868, the yield was $1,500,000 gold; $193,000 silver. The detritus of all the rivers of this State is auriferous. An English company works the Marmato gold mine and the Santa Anna silver mine, near Honda, on the Magdelina River. They have provided twelve stamping mills, representing one hundred and ten heads, which crush from ten to nineteen thousand tons per year, yielding, on an average, eleven pennyweights eleven grains of gold per ton.