Apart from the Andes, the zone which used to feel the influence of the trans-Andean markets has been steadily reduced in the last forty years. At one time it comprised the whole range of the scrub, and even overflowed upon the prairie region, but it is now limited to the nearest cantons to the fringe of the mountains. Over the greater part of the _monte_ the cattle are now sent in other directions; either to Buenos Aires or to other Argentine towns with a growing population, such as Cordoba, Mendoza, and Tucuman. The rupture of commercial relations with Chile has, however, not made any notable change in the pastoral industry. Pastoral life in the scrub has very uniform characters. It is chiefly dominated by the question of water-supply. Natural open water is scarce, and the cattle can drink only where man's industry makes it possible. The problem of taming the beasts, which the breeders on the prairies have not always been able to solve, is simplified by the scarcity of water. There is no need to hunt the cattle, no periodical _rodeos_, when the herd is drawn in every night by thirst to the water-supply. Advance in colonization means the provision of wells and reservoirs (_baldes_ and _represas_), without which the breeders cannot occupy the plain permanently, but have to fall back during the dry season upon the few streams that cross it. The word _balderia_ means districts where the presence of a sheet of water not far underground has enabled them to form a system of wells. The best known is the Balderia Puntana, in the northern part of the province of San Luis. Of the regions apart from the Andes which still depend on the Chilean market it will be enough to mention two, which may be regarded as typical. The first is the Chaco Salteno, on the eastern slope of the Sierra de la Lumbrera. The Lumbrera is a lofty anticlinal range of limestones and red sandstones, which pass to the west underneath the clay of the Chaco plain, and separate it from the great longitudinal sub-Andean corridor, which was followed by the old road, and is now followed by the railway from Tucuman to Jujuy. Colonization began beyond the Lumbrera in the eighteenth century by passing round it, from south to north, by the valleys of the Juramento and the San Francisco (which joins the Bermejo). The ranches, which employed the Indians--the occupation of the Chaco at this point being pacific--bordered the Bermejo and the Rio del Valle, which flows from the Lumbrera range toward the former bed of the Bermejo, and washes the foot of the range at the edge of the plain. [Illustration: DRY SCRUB OF THE CENTRAL CHACO. _On the Anatuya line (province of Santiago del Estero). Cactus. The leafless tree in the foreground is a red_ quebracho. _The leafy trees are white_ quebrachos. Photograph by the Author.]