[11] See the curious picture, which Hutchinson gives us, of military life on the Rio Salado de Santiago about the middle of the nineteenth century. The provinces which were to combine in forming the Argentine Republic had no economic unity. They were really two countries, two separate worlds, the coast regions and the mountain regions (_de arriba_), joined together, but not blended, by the main road from Buenos Aires to Peru, by way of Cordoba, Tucuman, and Salta. They represented two different branches of Spanish colonization. "Two human streams," says Mitre, "contributed to the peopling of the vice-royalty.... The first came directly from Spain, the mother country. It occupied and peopled the banks in the basin of the Rio de la Plata, in the name of the right of discovery and conquest, and fertilized them by its labour. The other stream came from the ancient empire of the Incas, already subdued by the Spanish armies. This spread toward the interior of the country as it passed from the Pacific to the Atlantic, occupied the land in virtue of the same rights, and exploited it by means of a feudal system.... The same year, 1535, saw the foundation of the two towns, Buenos Aires and Lima, and was the centre of these two cycles of discoveries and conquests. Thirty-eight years later, in the same year, 1573, the Conquistadores who came from Peru founded the town of Cordoba, two hundred miles away from the Parana, while those who came from the Rio de la Plata founded the town of Santa Fe on the banks of that river."[12] [12] Mitre, _Historia de Belgrano_, I, ch. i. pp. 4 and 5. [Illustration: MAP I.--ARGENTINA. THE NATURAL REGIONS. _The map shows the distribution of the natural regions--the dry Andes in the north-west, with irrigated cultivation; the monte, or brush, which is still used for extensive breeding; and the Pampa, with its great areas of cereals and lucerne. The line marking the frontier of 1875 shows the speed at which colonization has developed in the western half of the plain of the Pampas. The only regions not given on the map are the plateau of Misiones, with its tropical forests, and the wet Andes of Patagonia._ To face p. 28.] Tucuman and Salta were established by conquerors from Peru, while San Juan and Mendoza were built by the Chilean Spaniards. The line of demarcation between the two zones of colonization crosses the immense desert plains of the interior, not the elevated tablelands of the Andes. The two types of Argentinians differed in every respect, in blood as well as in environment. The indigenous race, which was eliminated on the coast, mingled intimately with the conquering race in the interior.