As regards travelling in Argentina, the traveller will find no difficulty as long as he keeps to the railway lines, which give a splendid service to almost every part of the country except Patagonia. When the railway fails, he will of course have to make his own arrangements for horses and mules and the like. An extremely useful work is the fifth edition of the Mulhalls' "Handbook of the River Plate." A new edition of this book is urgently needed,[158] for the last appeared in 1885, and the extremely full statistical information is quite out of date, and travelling in the country, which the handbook well describes, is much easier than it was in those days. But the writers draw up with great care a number of interesting routes, and the traveller, using them as a foundation, can easily bring the information up to date, and will find an interesting study in noting the wonderful changes which have come over Argentina in exactly a quarter of a century. In the bibliography an attempt has been made to enumerate the important books on the whole subject, and that of Captain Musters on Patagonia may be recommended. A great many wanderers in the early part of the nineteenth century have left highly interesting accounts of their adventurous travels. In those days ferocious Indians, who massacred every small party of white men at sight, revolutionary soldiers, and cruel bandits added greatly to the dangers of such excursions, and a journey across the Pampas was looked upon as almost equivalent to taking leave of the world. A young gentleman in the first edition of his book remarks with gentle melancholy that, being disappointed in his hopes of happiness by a "beloved female," he had decided to travel in the Plate district. His editorial friend appends a note that the gentleman had been last heard of in a remote part of Chile many years ago, and was believed to have perished. However, the traveller happily returned and published a second edition or work in which he accounted for his long silence by a series of hardships, among which a lengthy term of imprisonment was only one item. Among these books that of Head is one of the most entertaining, but Darwin's "Voyage of the _Beagle_," must be held to be probably the best work ever published on Argentina, and he observed the country at a most interesting period. Adventures would be hard to find nowadays in the Pampas, but the greater part of Patagonia is as wild and inaccessible as ever, and in many regions of the Gran Chaco the explorer carries his life in his hands owing to the fierce disposition of the Indians.