The growth of the population of Argentina can be followed closely from the middle of the eighteenth century. A Census taken in 1774 gives the Buenos Aires district within the first line of forts 6,000 inhabitants. At the end of the eighteenth century (Census of 1797, quoted by D'Azara) the population of the province of Buenos Aires, without the town, was a little over 30,000 souls, the zone occupied having been extended in the meantime, at least in part, as far as the Salado. Woodbine Parish estimates the population at 80,000 in 1824, at the time when the expansion southward, beyond the Salado, as far as the Sierra de Tandil, began. It doubled between 1824 and 1855. The northern departments then counted 45,000 inhabitants, the western 58,000 and the southern 63,000. The density was still a little greater in the north, along the road to Peru, but the advance of sheep-rearing in the south was beginning to change the centre of gravity of colonization. The first regular Census of the Argentine Republic in 1869 showed a still more rapid advance. The population of the Buenos Aires province had grown to 315,000 inhabitants. The increase was greatest in the west, where tillage began to extend round Chivilcoy, beyond the pastoral area, and in the south, where sheep-farms multiplied. The population of the southern departments more than doubled in fourteen years (137,000 inhabitants to 70,000 square kilometres in occupation, or two to the square kilometre). However, the Pampean region--Buenos Aires (including the capital), Santa Fe, and the southern part of Cordoba--still had a smaller population than that of the northern and north-western provinces: 626,000 as compared with 813,000. The Mesopotamian provinces had then 263,000 inhabitants. The proportion was reversed twenty-five years later at the 1895 Census. The population of the Pampas had increased threefold, and was more than a half of the entire population of the country. That of the western and north-western provinces was about a third of the whole, and had only increased by fifty per cent.