The climate of the northern portion is tropical; of the central part, semi-tropical; of the extreme south, temperate or cold. The country is generally well watered excepting in the northwestern part, where the land is dry and alkaline, like the arid regions of North America. The soil is a rich, deep loam, from four to six feet in depth, excepting in Patagonia and the western pampas, where there is a coarse gravel and detritus from the Andes. Instead of the dense tropical forest of the Amazon valley, the pampas are covered by a coarse grass, three or four feet high, growing in large tussocks and all the year round of a dark green. The strong grass crowds out all trees and almost all plants, so that scarcely a flower relieves the uniform, everlasting verdure. Instead of the arboreal animals of the Amazon there is the rhea or American ostrich, "ship of the wilderness," adapted to the {20} pampas, but unable to live in the forests. The gauchos have hunted it for the last three centuries, but it is now passing away and will soon be lost to the pampas, as the buffalo has been to the North American prairie. The pampas are far better adapted to the raising of cattle than our prairies, for the grass is always green and the winters are milder. Cattle, horses, and sheep imported by the Spaniards and turned on to the pampas rapidly increased, and now immense herds feed on the plains. The Indians who inhabit the pampas, instead of being confined to one locality and journeying only by canoe, like the Indians on the Amazon, wander over the length and breadth of the pampas, hunting the ostrich and cattle. The cattle are tended by gauchos, as the cow-boys are called, half-breeds as wild as the herds they tend. Constant warfare exists between the Indians and the gauchos, unless they unite to attack the settlers. After one of the Indian raids the government dug an immense ditch from a river to the Andes and drove the Indians to the farther side, and since then there have been fewer raids--and fewer Indians. The land was held in large blocks of many thousand acres, worked by overseers and gauchos. The animals were killed by hundreds of thousands for their skins. This state of things is, however, gradually passing away, for during the last twenty years emigrants from the old world have settled in the country as farmers and planters. The fourteen provinces which form the Argentine Republic have never been welded into one nation, and have seldom had a moment's peace. The gauchos have been a continual scourge, and the gaucho generals its rulers and harriers combined. Unfortunately, here, as in other Spanish states, one dictator has succeeded another. Thirty presidents, or dictators, have reigned within fifty years. At one time five provinces had each a separate dictator. The neighboring republic of Uruguay, formerly a part of the Argentine Confederation, had 26 revolutions in the twenty-three years from 1864 to 1887.