The Territories of Neuquen and the Rio Negro will soon have irrigation on a vast scale and of most modern design. This work is being carried out for the National Government by the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway Company and is already far advanced. The virgin soil of the plains of these Territories is almost incredibly rich in humus and alluvial deposit; and they have a wealthy Railway Company ready to afford all necessary means of transport to deep-water ports which nature has already provided on the Atlantic Ocean at, comparatively, no great distance from any of, and in many instances close to, what will be their chief centres of agricultural production (in the widest sense of that term). RIO NEGRO [Illustration: HEAD PORTION OF THE RIO NEGRO (ARGENTINA) GREAT IRRIGATION AND CURRENT CONTROL WORKS] The most important of the general observations applicable to this Territory have already been made immediately above; remains in their connection only to be said that the Northern side of the valley of the Rio Negro itself contains some of the naturally richest soil to be found anywhere in the Republic. Anyone armed with a watering-pot can grow any temperate-zone crop, fruit or plant and be astounded by the brobdingnagian proportions of its yield, accomplished in a space of time suggestive of Jack’s Beanstalk. And this anywhere in the midst of what now is an arid desert, on which the only vegetation is sparse, stunted, scrubby, useless bush. The reasons for this are that these eastern regions of the South have practically no rainfall at all and that all the water running from the Andes to the Sea has already found its way, farther west, into one or other of the great Rivers Colorado and Negro. The huge irrigation scheme now being carried out will utilize an enormous natural hollow formerly known as the CUENCA VIDAL, now rechristened Lago Pellegrini (after a once prominent Argentine statesman) as a natural storage reservoir. The surplus water from the lake and river system, which makes a network over the whole of the western part of the territories of Neuquen and the Rio Negro, at the base of the Andes, will be utilized for the irrigation of their eastern plains. This system is also destined to serve another necessary purpose: namely, to regulate the flow of the Rio Negro. This is very necessary indeed; for this river, swollen by the melting of Andine snow and ice, which has in some years taken place in an exceptional degree, comes down suddenly with overpowering violence, headed by what is like a huge tidal wave, and sweeps everything within miles of its normal, deep-cut, banks before it.