Leaving the river and travelling toward the forest on the west, one first crosses a narrow belt of estates which form an almost unbroken line from San Javier to Resistencia. These are old colonies, mostly founded about 1870, at the same time as the first colonies in the centre of Santa Fe. They had the advantage of being within reach of the river-route, the network of railways that serves the colonies of Santa Fe not being constructed until after 1880. They have not shown the same capacity for extension as the colonies on the prairie, but they are firmly rooted, on high and well-drained land, very different from the clays of the Chaco, where the alluvial beds of the Parana alternate with stuff that seems to come from the left bank. They grow flax, earth-nuts, sugar cane, and cotton. Behind this slight agricultural facade are the large estates of the factories. In the division of the land the industrial firms sought the districts which were richest in _quebracho_. Buyers of land who had no industrial plans--foreign capitalists and Portenos--and who obtained large concessions in little-known regions, sold back to the factories the plots where there was plenty of wood, after they had taken stock of their property. They converted the remainder into _estancias_ (ranches). The district to the north of the Central Norte Railway, from San Cristobal to Tostado, where the forest, which will presently yield to the plain, breaks into patches and looks like a park, includes a number of these modern _estancias_, in which lucerne is beginning to replace the grasses of the natural vegetation. [Illustration: QUEBRACHO TRUNKS LYING AT THE STATIONS. _Eastern Chaco, on the Resistencia line (Santa Fe province). Here the quebracho is exploited for tannic acid, not sleepers_. Photographs by the Author. PLATE XI. To face p. 116.]