If one considers in detail the distribution of the population of the Pampean plain in 1895, one sees that beyond the suburbs of Buenos Aires the area of greatest density--five to eight per square kilometre--was in the north-west, between San Andres de Giles and Pergamino, a district of advanced methods, where the cultivation of maize was beginning to occupy a good part of the land. The population was confined to the west of the preceding zone, in the agricultural area of Junin, Chacabuco and Chivilcoy. This area, where maize and wheat were next each other, already embraced Viente Cinco de Mayo (five to the square kilometre) on the west and Nueve de Julio (2.5). In the south of Buenos Aires, the departments of the left bank of the Salado, which were entirely given up to breeding, but long colonized, had a density of three to five per square kilometre. The region lying between the lower Salado and the Sierra de Tandil, a sheep-breeding area, then giving good returns but of recent colonization, had not more than three. The density falls rapidly as one goes westward. It sinks to less than one in the north-west and west of the Buenos Aires province, in the area where the cattle-breeders from the east had settled. At Santa Fe, the region of the colonies, at the level both of Rosario and Santa Fe, had five inhabitants per square kilometre. But beyond the Cordoba frontier the density falls to two in the San Justo department, and still less further south, at Marcos Juarez, Union and General Lopez. [Illustration: THE OLDER INDUSTRIES OF THE PAMPA: DRYING HIDES. Photograph by Soc. Fotografica de Aficionados.] [Illustration: DRYING SALT MEAT. Photograph by Soc. Fotografica de Aficionados. PLATE XXIII. To face p. 262.] In 1914 the density was more than fifteen in the whole of the maize area in the Buenos Aires and Santa Fe provinces, and it approached this figure in the departments of the old agricultural colonies on the middle Salado. In the region of the lucerne farms it was three to five, except in the south-east (departments of Veinte Cinco de Mayo, Nueve de Julio and Bolivia), where it rose, thanks to the co-existence of ranches and of wheat and maize. It sank to between two and three in the wheat area in the south and south-east of Buenos Aires. At Santa Fe the district of the colonies had seven to the square kilometre.