[Illustration: LORETO: FARMING BY INUNDATION. _In the zone of the scrub, where the floods of the Rio Dulce spread. The interior delta of the Rio Dulce is one of the earliest centres of population in Argentina._ Photograph by the Author. PLATE IX. To face p. 100.] Apart from the _banados_ of the Dulce and the Salado, the province of Corrientes contains the main reservoir from which the timber industry drew its manual workers. Just as at Santiago del Estero, one finds at Corrientes also the opposition between agricultural and breeding districts which is so common in the older colonized regions of South America. The _estancieros_ (ranchers), who are breeders, are the masters of Corrientes, but the line of low hills of sand and red clay, punctuated by lagoons, which crosses the north-western corner of the province, is not subject to their domination. There the land is subdivided; there are once more fields. Tobacco was an article of export for this fraction of Corrientes, especially after the political isolation of Paraguay, the chief producer of tobacco in the nineteenth century. During the whole of the first half of the nineteenth century the tobacco-buyers travelled all over Corrientes after the harvest, in January and February. The fertile soil, moreover, with a mild climate in which tropical plants flourish as well as those of the temperate zone, provides the elements of a local comfort which is complete in itself. Here again agricultural colonization has created a relatively dense nucleus of population, capable of great increase. Although the administrative divisions do not exactly correspond with the natural divisions, the unequal distribution of the population in Corrientes is made plain by the figures given in the census of 1895. The density rises in the agricultural areas to eight inhabitants per square kilometre, in the department of Bellavista; ten at San Cosma; fourteen at Lomas; thirty at San Roque. It is only between one and two in the purely pastoral departments (Concepcion and Mercedes).