It is generally reckoned that ten per cent of a cattle herd is fit for the slaughterhouse: but Brazil cannot offer three million of her existing stock to the yards. She has too many varieties, probably too much of the humped breed derived from Indian ancestry, although it has warm defenders, and there is a conspicuous lack of young fat cattle. As an example of the speed with which poor stock may be improved by good, unified methods, there is Brazil’s neighbour Argentina, a country which thirty-five years ago had less than nine million head of cattle, and these of a breed inferior to the Brazilian average today. Setting about her task methodically, Argentina created a complete transformation in the character of her herds, and while exporting great quantities of meat at the same time increased her stock so largely that by the year 1910 she had thirty million head. Sums spent on breeding stock were enormous during this period: in 1906, the banner year of importation, Argentina purchased (almost exclusively from Great Britain) 2,450 pure-bred cattle, 7,500 thoroughbred sheep, and one thousand blood horses. As a result she has animals today which take prizes side by side with pure Herefords and Durhams; the average _abattoir_ price for steers is about two hundred Argentine pesos, or say eighty American dollars; she is able to record the sale of thousands of splendid creatures, amongst them a champion bull bred on her pastures which brought the price of thirty-two thousand dollars in United States currency. Today Argentina has more herds of thoroughly pure stock cattle than any other country in the world; _estancias_ full of animals of fine blood, so much alike that to see them in endless lines, with white star on breast and head, is like looking at a concrete arithmetical calculation, are handed down as inheritances. Yet when the Argentine began her work she had no such advantages of modern invention as lie to the hand of Brazil; cold storage was not commercially developed, packing-houses were immature. She had to face the competition of the United States, and world markets were not educated to the reception of South American meat. Now cold storage is an art, steamers are fitted with refrigerator space as a matter of course, South American meat is welcome on world markets, and the United States is no longer taken into consideration as a rival meat exporter.