cisco, were acquired in 1898. There are eight inhabited and several small uninhabited islands, with a total area of 6,449 square miles.

The Philippine Islands, an archipelago comprising over 3,000 islands and islets in the south Pacific, centered by the intersection of the 12th parallel of north latitude and the 122d degree of east longitude, were taken from Spain after the war of 1898. The total area of the archipelago is 114,958 square miles.

Porto Rico, a large island in the West Indies about a thousand miles from New York, was also taken from Spain in 1898. It has an area of 3,435 square miles. Guam, also ceded by Spain in 1898, lies in the Ladrone group in the south Pacific, about 1,500 miles east of Manila. The area is 210 square miles. The island of Tutuila, one of the Samoan group, with an area of 77 square miles, was annexed in 1899. The adjacent Manna group also belongs to the United States.

The United States has also acquired from time to time a number of small islands in the Pacific, most of them uninhabited. The most important are Baker, Christmas, Gallego, Gardner, Howland, Johnston, Marcus, Midway (a cable station), Morell, Palmyra, Penrhyn, Phoenix, and Starbuck islands. The Santa Barbara Islands, off the coast of California, and the Aleutian group also belong to the

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Population of non-contiguous territory including Alaska, Hawaii, Porto Rico, the Philippine Islands, the islands of Guam and Samoa, and the Canal Zone, and persons in military and naval service stationed abroad...

Total

9, 169, 668

101, 141, 934

The tables on pages 10 and 11 show the population at each census.

Topography.

The contour of the United States is that of an irregular parallelogram whose boundaries, with slight exceptions, coincide with those of nature. It is bounded on the east by the Atlantic Ocean; on the south by the Gulf of Mexico, the Rio Grande del Norte and a conventional line running westward to the California coast; on the west by the Pacific Ocean, and on the north by an artificial line, the 49th parallel of north latitude from Puget Sound to the Lake of the Woods, thence along the Rainy River to Lake Superior, and thence along the line of greatest depth of Lakes Superior, Huron, Erie and Ontario, and the River St. Lawrence, until it joins the artificial line forming the northern boundary of the States of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, reaching the Atlantic at the mouth of the St. Croix River.

The area of the United States territory is 3,026,789 square miles; this includes 52,630 square miles of water exclusive of the Great Lakes, the

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American portion of which amounts to 61,670 square miles. Alaska has an area of 590,884 square miles, which makes the total area of the United States territory on the North American continent 3,617,673 square miles.

The extreme length of the United States territory from east to west is about 2,750 miles, and the extreme length from north to south is about 1,700 miles. Leaving out of consideration the political boundaries already mentioned, the length of the United States coasts not including Alaska, following the contour lines of the shores, islands and navigable estuaries, amounts to about 36,300 miles, of which the Atlantic coast claims 12,359 miles, the Gulf coast 5,744 miles, and the Pacific coast 3,251 miles.

The territory of the United States. consists of a vast central plain, the water shed of the Missouri-Mississippi river system and its affluents. This is bounded on the east by the Appalachian mountain system, which is separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a fringe of land known as the Atlantic slope. It is bounded on the west by the broad and complex ranges of the Rocky Mountains, and the plateau lying between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Range, west of which lie the valleys of California and Oregon, which are separated from the Pacific Ocean by the lower coast ranges.