The population of Argentina has also felt the attraction of the urban centres. The growth of the towns is due to both foreign and national immigration. The development of urban life, which is one of the characteristic features of modern Argentina, is a recent phenomenon. There was no indication of its coming in the eighteenth century. D'Azara was, on the contrary, struck by the absence of communal life (_pueblos unidos_). The scattering of the population was a result of the predominance of breeding. "If these people found profit in agriculture, one would see them gather together in villages, instead of the whole population being dispersed in ranches."[141] It is this scattering of the population rather than an absolute numerical inferiority--the solitude, "the desert, the universal horizon that forced itself into the very entrails of the land"[142]--that moulded the fiery soul of the _gaucho_. [141] F. de Azara, _Memorias sobre el estado rural del rio de la Plata en 1801_, p. 10. [142] Sarmiento, _El Facundo_, p. 19. [Illustration: A HERD OF CREOLE CATTLE. Photograph by Widmayer.] [Illustration: A HERD OF DURHAM CATTLE. Photograph by Soc. Fotografica de Aficionados. PLATE XXIV. To face p. 268.] The primitive urban sites were all either on the river or on the historic roads to Chile and Peru. The only towns of the Parana region at the end of the eighteenth century were Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Corrientes. As to towns in the interior, Helms's journey in 1778 gives us some idea of their size. Cordoba, at the crossing of the Peru road and the tracks to the province of La Rioja, had then 1,500 white inhabitants and 4,000 blacks. As it was near the Sierra, which provided granite and lime, it had some semblance of architecture, and had paved streets, which struck even the traveller from Buenos Aires. The attraction of its schools was felt over a wide area. We still have a list of students from Paraguay who studied at Cordoba University in the eighteenth century.[143] Tucuman and Salta, especially Salta, also were busy centres. Salta had 600 Spanish families and 9,000 inhabitants in all, and its influence extended as far as Peru and Chile. Jujuy, on the other hand, was a very small town. Helms mentions the decay of Santiago del Estero. The trade which had once flourished there had, he says, gone in a different direction. The prosperity of Santiago was, as a matter of fact, connected with traffic on the direct route from Santa Fe to Tucuman, which ceased at the close of the eighteenth century. Santa Fe also was a decaying town at the close of the eighteenth century, and would remain such until the middle of the nineteenth. Its distress was due, not merely to the suspension of its direct trade with Peru, but also to the decay and isolation of Paraguay, which had