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.