ur of the Andes, like the beauty of the Alps,
was never sketched by a native.

Ecuador boasts of one University and eleven colleges; yet the people are
not educated. Literature, science, philosophy, law, medicine, are only
names. Nearly all young gentlemen are doctors of something; but their
education is strangely dwarfed, defective, and distorted; and their
knowledge, such as they have, is without power, as it is without
practice. The University of Quito has two hundred and eighty-five
students, of whom thirty-five are pursuing law, and eighteen medicine.
There are eleven professors. They receive no fees from the students, but
an annual salary of $300. The library contains eleven thousand volumes,
nearly all old Latin, Spanish, and French works. The cabinet is a bushel
of stones cast into one corner of a lumber-room, covered with dust, and
crying out in vain for a man in the University to name them. The College
of Tacunga has forty-five students; a fine chemical and philosophical
apparatus, but no one to handle it; and a set of rocks from Europe, but
only a handful from Ecuador. The College of Riobamba has four
professors, and one hundred and twenty students. In the common schools,
the pupils study in concert aloud, Arab fashion. There are four papers
in the republic; two in Guayaquil, one in Cuenca, and one in Quito. _El
Nacional_, of the capital, is an official organ, not a newspaper; it
contains fourteen duodecimo pages, and is published occasionally by the
Minister of the Interior. Like the _Gazeta_ of Madrid, it is one of the
greatest satires ever deliberately published by any people on itself.
There is likewise but one paper in Cuzco, _El Triumfo del Pueblo_.

The amusements of Quito are few, and not very amusing. Indo-Castilian
blood runs too slowly for merry-making. There are no operas or concerts,
no theatres or lectures, no museums or menageries. For dramas they have
revolutions; for menageries, bull-baitings. A bull-bait is not a
bull-fight. There is no coliseum or amphitheatre; no _matador_ gives the
scientific death-wound. Unlike their fraternity in the ring of Seville,
where they are doomed to die, the animals are only doomed to be
pothered; they are "scotched, not killed." They are teased and tormented
by yelling crowds, barking dogs, brass bands, red ponchos, tail-pulling,
fire-crackers, wooden lances, and such like. The Plaza de Toros is the
Plaza de San Francisco. This sport is reserved for the most n