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Rh my friends. Aberastain, Penero, Lopez, Alberdi, Gutierrez, Oro, Tejedor, Fragueiro, Montt, and many others, contributed, without knowing it, to develop my mind, transmitting their ideas to me, and giving me an opportunity to unfold my own as the complement to theirs.

"How are ideas formed? I believe that in the mind of one who studies, it happens as in those inundations of rivers where the waters deposit little by little the particular solids washed down by them, and with which they fertilize the adjacent territory."

With the aid of the old friends whom he found in San Juan, he founded at this time a periodical called "La Zonda," which criticized village manners, promoted the spirit of enthusiasm, and would have been of incalculable benefit, if the government, which the periodical did not attack, had not felt a horrible apprehension of the light it was sending abroad.

"Out of this came my second imprisonment," he says, "for refusing to pay twenty-six dollars, of which in violation of the laws and decrees in force, the government proposed to rob me. Don Antonio Benavides (Governor), and Don Antonio Maradona (Minister), jointly and in solidum owe me twenty-six dollars every day that impends, and they shall pay me, as God lives, one or the other of them, sooner or later, the latter rather than the former, because a minister is put in his place to give counsel to the governor, who does not know so well the laws of his country, too self-willed to be restrained by laws, those frail barriers to his caprice, but which are insuperable through the respect their direct agents deserve among cultivated men. The governor of San Juan, wishing to free the province from the serious evils which might be brought upon it by the publication of a periodical which was edited by