Passing from the hunting country to the zone of ranches, one notices that the main work of the breeder is to prevent his cattle from running wild. "The ranches of this country," said Dean Funes, "having been set up on immense plains, on which it was not easy to confine the herds within fixed limits, it sometimes happened that the animals went vast distances in search of water or pasture, and ended by being regarded as wild and ownerless," When D'Azara wants to show that the ranches of Paraguay are superior to those of Buenos Aires, he is content to say that there the animals are tamer (_mansos_). With the wild animal (_alzado_) is contrasted the _de rodeo_ animal: that is to say, the cattle which are rounded up periodically in the centre of the ranch to be taken to the pasture where they must live (_aquerenciar_). It is the difficulty of preventing the dispersal of the herd that fixes the price of the _rincones_ (surrounded by inundated areas) of Corrientes, in which the animals are captives. MacKann's description of pastoral life in the Buenos Aires province in the middle of the nineteenth century give us a very clear impression of the stage of transition between exploiting the natural increase of a herd that multiplies without man's intervention, and breeding in the strict sense. The value of a horse in the former case is almost exclusively the cost of breaking it in. The breeder is actually anxious when he sees his horses increase, as he fears he may not have the resources for breaking them in. The most formidable of the dangers that threatened the feeble discipline of the herd was drought. That in the year 1827 was a disaster. The animals left the ranches in a body to go southward, where they mixed.[89] [89] The water problem is not as important for the history of colonization in the Pampean region as in the north. Primitive breeding was confined to natural supplies of water, lagoons or streams, and to shallow wells (_jagueles_) dug down to the superficial sheet, which is generally not deep, but is liable to dry up. As colonization improved, the breeder, and subsequently the farmer, were better equipped for boring wells, and no longer feared drought. They got down to the deeper waters, semi-artesian (Buenos Aires district) or artesian (west of the Santa Fe province, round San Francisco). In other places the superficial waters, which are fresher than the deeper layers, were used by adapting new types of filters to the wells (Buena Esperanza district). The only two districts where the quest of water offered any difficulty are the south-west corner of the Pampean region and the northern extremity of the prairie in the Santa Fe province. The sheets of water are very irregular there, often saline, and it was a long time before the ranches got an assured supply.