Science Quote by Edward Burnett Tylor

A throwaway line with the bite of fieldwork fatigue, Tylor’s remark frames Vera Cruz as a kind of national lightning rod: when Mexico hurts, that port city gets struck first and hardest. The intent isn’t lyrical sympathy so much as a cool, almost statistical observation dressed up as conversational certainty. “Sure to” reads like an anthropologist’s shorthand for a recurring pattern he’s watched repeat enough times to feel inevitable.

The subtext is where it gets revealing. Tylor isn’t only noting misfortune; he’s mapping how power and vulnerability concentrate. Vera Cruz, as Mexico’s Atlantic gateway, has historically been where outside pressures land and internal crises become visible: invasion routes, commercial chokepoints, epidemics arriving by ship, political instability amplified by the fact that it’s exposed, tradable, occupiable. Calling it “its full share” implies an unfair distribution of suffering, but also a quiet admission that “the country” is not evenly experienced. National trouble is abstract until it hits a specific place.

Context matters: Tylor travels in the mid-19th century, when Mexico is reeling from war, foreign intervention, and contested sovereignty. For a British scientist observing from the imperial periphery, the line also carries an outsider’s compression: complex local histories reduced to a diagnostic quip. That reduction is the point. It works because it sounds like common sense, the kind that slips into travel writing and then hardens into a reputation, turning a city into a symbol of recurring disaster rather than a living place with agency.