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 Bermejo join. Larger boats are apt to be caught by falling water. A sixty-ton steamboat is now lying wrecked at Riva- davia on the old Bermejo, having been caught thus. The old channel formerly carried most of the water, and though it was narrow it could be navigated. But the river overflowed its banks, forming a new channel; and the whole of the current is now carried by the new channel, which is called the New Bermejo or Teuco, At the railroad crossing the river bed is half a mile wide, but the river at the time I saw it was much narrower, occupying only one quarter of the width of its bed so that broad yellow and white patches of gravel and sand lay in sheets on either side of the curves, making a natural path- way down through the forest which grows in thick stands on either bank. Where I saw the forest it was quite variable in character, now consisting of trees whose trunks were forty to fifty feet in height and with even stands of one or two types of trees, again consisting of tall and short trees mixed with or without undergrowth. It grows densest in the low places and along the river banks and becomes thinner, with grasses appearing here and there, as one goes toward slight elevations or comes into the gravelly zone nearer the moun- tains, where the ground water lies at a lower level.

Such is the frontier region in which Argentina is now extend- ing her important sugar belt and from which she draws an in- creasing number of cattle for the heavy demands of her own market and that of her neighbor, Chile.

At the village of Embarcación one sees long lines of freight cars loaded with bellowing cattle that make the place noisy day and night. They are long-horned stock from the Chaco. Some of them are driven for great distances, and the first stage of their journey is ended at the railway yards at Embarcación. They are not fed on alfalfa or bred for fine points, They are strong, large-boned beasts raised in the scrub and coarse pastures of the Gran Chaco, accustomed to travel long dis- tances, to do without water for a day or two at a time, and to