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AN OSTRICH.

Of late years, as Mr. Hirst shows in his book, enormous tracts of land, especially to the south of Buenos Aires and high up the Paraná, are being broken up for wheat-growing, and Bahia Blanca, the ambitious port south of Buenos Aires, bids fair soon to become a great centre of grain export. Vast quantities of maize are also raised in the country on the banks of the Paraná, and are mainly exported from Rosario. Whichever way one turns fresh evidences of fertility are forced upon the attention. Cattle standing knee-deep in pasture, sheep growing fat at fifty to the acre, leagues of ripening corn, equal to any on earth, growing upon virgin soil; flowers to which we are accustomed in England as tender shrubs developing here into robust blossoming trees; and fruit orchards flourishing, solid miles of them, prolific beyond belief, within a short distance of Buenos Aires, where only a few years ago nothing but wild scrub and tangled forest existed.

The extension of railways in every direction has now to a great extent destroyed or modified the old free life upon the pampas of Argentina. The estancias, except in remote districts, are often large establishments where all the comforts and some of the luxuries of life are to be found, instead of the walled semi-fortresses of olden times. The white-domed well, with its shady ombú-tree, still stands near the principal entrance to the courtyard, and the high palenque, the hitching-post for horses, still flanks the gateway, but the picturesque gaucho who goes loping over the plain, his lasso at his saddle-bow, his naked feet thrust into his big leather horseskin brogues, and his poncho fluttering in the breeze, is no longer the monarch of the pampa as he once was, for civilisation has touched even him. The silver ornaments that once covered his accoutrements are less abundant than they used to be; he is fortunately less free with his knife, for he was never much of a hand with a gun, loving the bolas better; and the rural railway station in which he likes to dawdle about in the intervals of his life in the saddle is the symbol of his discipline and decline.

The great waterways that characterise Argentina, although they are now less used for passenger traffic into the hinterland than formerly, must still in the future be a great, if not the principal, highway for the produce of the distant interior. Rosario, some two hundred miles above Buenos Aires on the Paraná, is a progressive and improving port, serving the rich maize and grain-growing expanses of the province of Santa Fé; and far up the stream, almost to the Paraguayan border at Corrientes, river ports are rapidly growing into importance as centres of export as the surrounding country is developed.

But wonderful as is the apparently boundless promise of this country of favoured plains, Argentina is not only pampa. The Gran Chaco, a great country still for the most part a wilderness, is a region of dim tropical forest, where the parrots, birds of paradise, and brilliant butterflies vie with those of the Amazon; a hot, moist region, where the monkey and the land crab flourish exceedingly, and where savage Indians still hunt down with primitive weapons the jaguar and the puma. From this sultry country of forest and flood to the almost treeless, arid steppes of Patagonia is a change rather to another world than to another province of the same Republic, and hardly less difference exists between the rolling plains of the pampa country and the magnificent regions of towering peaks, stern uplands, and vast lakes that form the Andine portions of Argentina.

The change is noticed as the road approaches Mendoza, where the pampa gradually gives way to a country strongly resembling parts of Southern Spain; a land of poplars, willows, and acacias shading endless lines of irrigation channels; for rain falls but seldom on this eastern side of the Sierra, and on all hands, climbing the lower laps of the hills and lining the valleys, are miles of vineyards, which provide a stout red wine for the rest of the Republic. Further west still the land becomes more broken and barren as the hills rise higher and higher, until the ruddy sides, white glaciers, and snow-crested mountains of the Sierra appear, the giant Aconcagua monarch of them all. Further south than this the wonderful series of lakes that are almost inland seas high up in the Andes exist, as yet only partially explored to decide the frontier dispute between the Argentine and Chile, the remote valleys and austere uplands where the giant sloth is still believed by many to linger, a sole survival of the world before the great flood that destroyed life upon the nascent continent unrecorded ages ago.

ACONCAGUA.

This marvellous country of Argentina is destined to be one of the great nations of the world. Nature is just, and in giving it a prodigious extent of flat fertile soil has more than compensated it for withholding the gift of abundant gold that has made the history of other portions of South America. With a climate that varies, as does that of Chile, from the tropical to the antarctic, with pasture and arable land unsurpassed in the world, and with facilities for transport by land and water enabling the fruits of the soil to be conveyed easily from remote districts to eager markets for them, no bounds can be set to the wealth that awaits enterprise in the country. As a highway, too, the possibilities of Argentina are immense. The connection of Buenos Aires by rail with Santiago and Valparaiso opens up a new and shorter route to New Zealand and Australia; whilst the rapidly progressing extension of the railway into Bolivia—another link, it is intended, of the line to run eventually from New York to Buenos Aires—will provide a new and welcome outlet for the treasures of her mines to Bolivia, a vast country without a port of its own.

The possession of a temperate climate has made the Argentine and Chile the two South American nations of most promise for the future, owing to the fact that both countries have attracted and assimilated a great admixture of the robust peoples of Europe. The immigrants have been to a large extent drawn from the countries where life is hard and the fare frugal; from North Italy, from Galicia and Russia; whilst in stern Patagonia the Scotsman and the Welshman find an environment after their own hearts. In the second generation the immigrants of all nations usually become sturdy Argentines, and this easy assimilation of new ethnological elements is one of the most striking signs of the energy of the nation as a whole, and the most promising fact as regards the future political stability of the country. That a composite race will result from this admixture, possessing much of the patient laboriousness of the Ligurian and the practical hardheadedness of the Teuton, to temper the keen vehemence of the Ibero-American, may be confidently hoped: and if such be the case the advantages that nature has showered upon the Argentine will be complete, and a splendid future for the country secure.

MARTIN HUME.

ARGENTINA