[10] It Is Said To Contain 60,000 Inhabitants.

Monte Video, the second town of importance on the banks of the Plata, has 15,000.

CHAPTER VII

BUENOS AYRES AND ST. FE

Excursion to St. Fe - Thistle Beds - Habits of the Bizcacha - Little Owl - Saline Streams - Level Plain - Mastodon - St. Fe - Change in Landscape - Geology - Tooth of extinct Horse - Relation of the Fossil and recent Quadrupeds of North and South America - Effects of a great Drought - Parana - Habits of the Jaguar - Scissor-beak - Kingfisher, Parrot, and Scissor-tail - Revolution - Buenos Ayres State of Government.

SEPTEMBER 27th. - In the evening I set out on an excursion to St. Fe, which is situated nearly three hundred English miles from Buenos Ayres, on the banks of the Parana. The roads in the neighbourhood of the city after the rainy weather, were extraordinarily bad. I should never have thought it possible for a bullock waggon to have crawled along: as it was, they scarcely went at the rate of a mile an hour, and a man was kept ahead, to survey the best line for making the attempt. The bullocks were terribly jaded: it is a great mistake to suppose that with improved roads, and an accelerated rate of travelling, the sufferings of the animals increase in the same proportion. We passed a train of waggons and a troop of beasts on their road to Mendoza. The distance is about 580 geographical miles, and the journey is generally performed in fifty days. These waggons are very long, narrow, and thatched with reeds; they have only two wheels, the diameter of which in some cases is as much as ten feet.

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