The attempt to present a bird's-eye view of Argentina may well be called presumptuous, for the country is larger than Russia in Europe and offers every variety of climate—"hot, cold, moist, and dry." Nor would the utmost industry of the traveller suffice to glean anything like complete information, for large tracts, owing to the inhospitality of nature or man, are unexplored, and both north and south he would be checked by impenetrable forests, or rugged barriers of rock, or by savage Indians who are saved from extinction by the inaccessibility of their habitations. Further, even as regards the settled parts of those districts which, however desolate, are practicable to the traveller, there is more to be learnt (and the conditions are ever changing) than could well be absorbed in a lifetime, for Argentina is not, like several South American countries, a mere gigantic mass of potential riches, but is rapidly assuming a leading position among the commercial states of the world. From Buenos Aires to Mendoza, from Bahia Blanca to Tucuman, are to be seen all the signs of wealth and prosperity, all the unmistakable portents of coming potency usually apparent in a new country that has emerged from the stage of childhood and weakness and feels the vigour of lusty youth in its veins, impelling it to take its place in the system of world politics.

If a single volume is all too short to represent Argentina in its manifold aspects, still less adequate is a single chapter to sketch its physical characteristics. In fact, its interest is at present more physical than moral, rather in its vast capacities for producing wealth and distributing it by means of magnificent waterways and ever-extending railroads, than in anything which Argentinians have done to ennoble life by arts or other services.

Before, however, proceeding to the study of a country the learner must endeavour to set before himself its principal geographical features, and as those of Argentina are well defined and comparatively simple they lend themselves to broad and clear classification. Geographically Argentina falls into four divisions. Firstly, Patagonia, which stretches from the Rio Colorado to Cape Horn. Secondly, the Andine region, which runs from the southern frontier of Bolivia right along the Chilian border. Thirdly, the Gran Chaco, which embraces the whole of the north of Argentina except the Andine strip. Fourthly, the Pampa, which comprises the central and best known region.

Patagonia received its name, patagon, or large paw, from the enormous footprints which the Spanish explorers remarked in the sand. Till recently it was almost a terra incognita, roamed by Indians and herds of guanacos, but of late years the beginnings of settlement have been made, and sheep-farming has become a considerable industry. The southern portion is cold and inclement all the year round, but in the north the summers are hot. The country is well watered by six considerable rivers—the Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz, Deseado, Coyly, and Gallegos—but scarcity of rain has caused it to be neglected by agriculturists. The whole of the plateau, indeed, has been called the Great Shingle Desert; it is of Tertiary formation, and the endless waste of sand and gravel was chiefly contributed by glacial action. This inhospitable desert is arranged in terraces which slope gently eastward, first from heights of 2,000 feet to 500, and then from this lower elevation to the sea-level.

In old days wonderful tales were told about the Patagonian giants—their enormous size, strength, and ferocity, but here it need only be said that the accounts were at least exaggerated. "In height, although very much above the average—some, indeed, reaching the height of 6 feet 4 inches, and all being broad and muscular—they have been greatly exaggerated, for, being very long in the body, they seem to tower above the European while sitting on horseback. They are short in the legs, and when standing on the ground do not on an average come over about 5 feet 11 inches."[3]

The Andine region, which in some of the South American States is the overwhelming characteristic, does not set a distinctive mark upon Argentina—essentially a plain country—but the western frontier of the Republic is guarded by a colossal range of mountains. These begin with Cerro de las Granadas in the extreme north, and extend beyond the Upper Colorado basin, where the Sierra Auco Mahinda of 16,000 feet is one of the most southerly of the important peaks. After this, although there is still a chain of moderate height, the mountains are not distinctively Andine. The highest of all the Argentine mountains is probably the Nevado de Famatina.

The real Argentina is the Pampa; it is that vast and fertile champaign which makes the great Republic what she is, and to which she owes all her wealth and prosperity. Erroneous as is the popular idea that Argentina is merely a land of grassy steppes and rich cornfields, this is due to the fact that all except specialists have confined their travels to the Pampa. It extends from Cordoba to the Rios Negro or Colorado. In it are contained the great and growing towns, and from it these towns draw their prosperity. It is a country to delight the heart of the agriculturist. In many countries of South America the traveller passes through interminable jungles sparingly scattered with patches of cultivation where a few bony cattle scour for a livelihood. In the Pampa there is rich tilth and fine pasture; magnificent red and white beasts graze and fatten, standing knee-deep in the fresh grass, and sheep innumerable are raised. The dead level of the land is not quite unbroken, for south of the Plate estuary there are two small mountain ranges, the Tandil and Ventana. They never exceed 2,800 feet. In the east the rainfall is generally satisfactory, but it becomes scanty in the western districts. The winter is cold, the summer decidedly hot, but the climate is not intemperate, and might be called pleasant but for the fierce hot and cold winds which disturb enjoyment and are in some cases prejudicial to health. This brief summary must, for the present, suffice for the four regions; as we survey the country more in detail, we shall have opportunities of describing their characteristics more fully. It remains, however, to take a brief survey of several features which can better be described while we look at the country as a whole. The geology of Argentina greatly interested Darwin. He says:[4] "The geology of Patagonia is interesting. Differently from Europe, where the Tertiary formations appear to have accumulated in bays, here along hundreds of miles of coast we have one great deposit, including many Tertiary shells, all apparently extinct. The most common shell is a massive, gigantic oyster, sometimes even a foot in diameter. These beds are covered by others of a peculiar soft, white stone, including much gypsum, and resembling chalk, but really of a pumiceous nature. It is highly remarkable, from being composed, to at least one-tenth part of its bulk, of infusoria: Professor Ehrenberg has already ascertained in it thirty oceanic forms. This bed extends for 500 miles along the coast, and probably for a considerably greater distance. At Port St. Julian its thickness is more than 800 feet! These white beds are everywhere capped by a mass of gravel, forming probably one of the largest beds of shingle in the world: it certainly extends from near the Rio Colorado to between 600 and 700 nautical miles southward; at Santa Cruz (a river a little south of St. Julian) it reaches to the foot of the Cordillera; half-way up the river its thickness is more than 200 feet; it probably everywhere extends to this great chain, whence the well-rounded pebbles of porphyry have been derived: we may consider its average breadth as 200 miles, and its average thickness as about 50 feet. If this great bed of pebbles, without including the mud necessarily derived from their attrition, was piled into a mound, it would form a great mountain chain! When we consider that all these pebbles, countless as the grains of sand in the desert, have been derived from the slow-falling masses of rock on the old coast-lines and banks of rivers, and that these fragments have been dashed into smaller pieces, and that each of them has since been slowly rolled, rounded, and far transported, the mind is stupefied in thinking over the long, absolutely necessary lapse of years. Yet all this gravel has been transported, and probably rounded, subsequently to the deposition of the white beds, and long subsequently to the underlying beds with their Tertiary shells." His observations upon the Cordillera are equally noteworthy. He says:[5] "No one fact in the geology of South America interested me more than these terraces of rudely stratified shingle. They precisely resemble in composition the matter which the torrents in each valley would deposit if they were checked in their course by any cause, such as entering a lake or arm of the sea; but the torrents, instead of depositing matter, are now steadily at work wearing away both the solid rock and these alluvial deposits, along the whole line of every main valley and side valley. It is impossible here to give the reasons, but I am convinced that the shingle terraces were accumulated during the gradual elevation of the Cordillera by the torrents delivering, at successive levels, their detritus on the beach-heads of long, narrow arms of the sea, first high up the valleys, then lower and lower down as the land slowly rose. If this be so, and I cannot doubt it, the grand and broken chain of the Cordillera, instead of having been suddenly thrown up, as was till lately the universal, and still is the common opinion of geologists, has been slowly upheaved in mass, in the same gradual manner as the coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific have risen within the recent period. A multitude of facts in the structure of the Cordillera, on this view, receive a simple explanation." His conclusion is: "Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of this earth."

The geological character of Argentina is tolerably uniform. The surface is a coating of sandy soil, not usually more than 2 feet thick, which is alluvial and, from a geological point of view, quite modern. In the western districts it is usually bare of vegetation, but in the east it is covered with green herbage more or less thick. Underneath this superficial covering, however, lies the true geological formation, and this consists of argillaceous earth or mud of a reddish colour and interspersed with marly rock called by the inhabitants Tosca rock. It extends to latitude 38° or thereabouts, and is the famous Pampean formation, which Darwin calls Pampean mud. The thickness of this stratum varies considerably; it may average about 40 feet, and geologically it belongs to the Quaternary epoch, otherwise called Diluvian or Post-Pliocene. Its most remarkable feature is the enormous number of mammiferous remains which are to be found embedded in this Pampean mud, and naturalists believe that it would be impossible to dig a deep trench in any direction without disinterring some of these extinct giants. Frequently perfect skeletons are discovered. These ossiferous remains are richest in the province of Buenos Aires and become somewhat less frequent in the north and west. Some observers have marvelled that such huge creatures in such vast numbers were ever able to find nourishment, but that question is not a serious difficulty, for the largest animals are by no means the most voracious, and doubtless, like elephants of to-day, their struggle for existence was not so much against hunger as against the depredations of other animals or natural catastrophes. A much greater puzzle is their disappearance. It has been suggested that they were killed off by the Glacial cold, but it is not obvious, as has been pointed out, why this visitation carried off the mastodons and spared the parrots and hummingbirds. Another theory, put forward by a savant named M. Bravard, opines that a vast simoon overwhelmed them, but such a belief, inadequate and full of difficulties, is refuted by the fact that most of the skeletons are mutilated. Had they been overwhelmed by sand storms, they would have been preserved in almost perfect condition. The notion of drought is also inadequate. Darwin remarks that it is absurd to suppose that the most terrible calamity of this sort could destroy every species from Patagonia to Behring Straits. It is impossible to suppose that prehistoric man hunted down and slew these great creatures. The simplest hypothesis and the one which surmounts the greatest number of difficulties is that a mighty deluge overwhelmed man and beast in common ruin. A great geologist"[6] says: "I argue that this destruction was caused by an invasion of the continent by water—a view which is completely en rapport with the facts presented by the great Pampean deposit, which was clearly laid down by water. How otherwise can we account for this complete destruction and the homogeneousness of the Pampas deposits containing bones? I find an evident proof of this in the immense number of bones and of entire animals whose numbers are greatest at the outlets of the valleys, as Mr. Darwin shows. He found the greatest number of the remains at Bahia Blanca, at Bajada, also on the coast, and on the affluents of the Rio Negro, also at the outlet of the valley. This proves that the animals were floated, and hence were chiefly carried to the coast."

But D'Orbigny seems to have erred in attempting to push his theory too far, for he insists that the great deluge not only destroyed the mammoths but at the same time created the Pampean plain. Nothing, however, can be more certain than that the lapse of countless ages was necessary to accumulate "the dust of continents to be." It is incredible that a great fragment of a continent was created per saltum. Darwin believes (and, it appears, rightly), "that the Pampean formation was slowly accumulated at the mouth of the former estuary of the Plata and in the sea adjoining it."[7] As we shall see, when we come to deal with Patagonia, the country was once a lake or sea, and the water system of South America was very different from what it now is, nor is there any difficulty in believing that the stupendous volume of the Parana waters (then even mightier than now) was able to wash down an accumulation of mud capable of making the sea into dry land.

So much, then, for the Quaternary Pampean mud interlaced with the bones of giant animals.

The Patagonian plain, however, is, in appearance at any rate, a different and much older formation, namely the Tertiary, an extensive gravel bed which possibly extends under the whole Quaternary deposit of the Pampa. But exposures occur of both varieties of this formation, i.e., the Patagonian and the Guaraman, in the banks of the Parana and elsewhere. It is supposed to have been contributed chiefly by Glacial action.

The river system of Argentina, which is perhaps the most remarkable physical feature of the country, next demands our attention. All the Argentine rivers find their way into the Atlantic, but all are insignificant compared with the marvellous confluence of mighty streams in the Plate estuary. The Parana rises in far-away Brazilian mountains, and is already a noble stream when it reaches the north-eastern confines of Paraguay. Flowing southward it then, for more than 100 miles, serves as the boundary between Paraguay and Brazil, and from the point where it is joined by the Iguazu River it becomes an Argentine stream, and, inclining more and more to the west, it is now the boundary between Argentine and Paraguay. At Corrientes it unites with the Paraguay River and flows almost due south, running into the Plate estuary at the same point as the Uruguay. Few rivers can match the Parana in majesty; at Rosario it is 20 miles wide, and would give the impression of the broad sea were it not for the cluster of poplar-clad islands which intercept the view. In thus tracing the course of the Parana we have mentioned only a few of the innumerable streams of the system in which it takes the most conspicuous part; the waters drain the south of Brazil, the whole of Uruguay and Paraguay, the fertile districts of Argentina, and even portions of Bolivia. The Parana—the Nile of the West—debouches through fourteen channels; it has a drainage area of 1,198,000 square miles, and the discharge of each twenty-four hours is sufficient to create a lake a mile square and 1,650 feet deep.[8] Subordinate to the Parana are several Argentine systems which deserve mention. The provinces of Corrientes and Entre Rios, called the Argentine Mesopotamia, are drained by the Corrientes, the Saranai, and the Gualeguay, which last falls eventually not into the Parana but the Pavon, a curious channel which runs parallel with the lower course of the great river for a considerable distance.

Having dealt with the giant, we now turn to the pygmies; for pygmies are the Patagonian and South Argentine streams in comparison with the Parana of the upper region. The Colorado basin presents a very curious phenomenon, in that it has lost the whole of its upper tributaries. One of these is the aforesaid errant Mendoza, which, with the Salado (the second river of that name) fail to reach the parent stream and end in the Laguna Amarga, a group of salt lakes situated at no great distance from the Rio Colorado. It is certain that, like Central Asia, Patagonia has experienced an immense increase of aridity—probably in comparatively recent times. The Colorado proper is perennial, and when swollen by melting snows from the Andes it is as broad as the Thames at London Bridge.

South of the Colorado we have the Rio Negro. It runs a solitary course through the desert unaided by any tributaries. It is formed by two other streams, the Neuquen and the Rio Limaz, which has its source in the picturesque lake of Nahuelhuapi. Patagonia, it may be added, has numerous lakes, some of great beauty. Other solitary streams, wholly dependent upon the Andes, may be enumerated—the Chubut, the Desire, the Chico, the Santa Cruz, and the Gallegos. On these rivers Burmeister[9] confesses that his information is very imperfect. They are now somewhat better known, but they are still difficult to explore. His remarks upon the Rio de Santa Cruz, concerning which he had gathered more facts than the others, may be given. He says: "Near the ocean it has a breadth of from 5 to 10 English miles, and is bordered by terraces in flights which rise on either side to a height of 500 feet. The surface of these terraces is occupied by broad plains covered with dry pebbles, and among them grow stunted plants and thorny bushes. It is a savage and gloomy land. Further inland, near the source, basaltic rocks appear which approach close to the river, and its bed is strewn with their fragments, which are about the size of a man's head. Huge blocks of granite and palÆologic schists are met with only in the neighbourhood of the Cordillera." Darwin made an adventurous voyage of 140 miles up this river in 1834, and describes it with his accustomed acuteness and accuracy.[10]

When we come to deal with Patagonia we shall have another opportunity of reverting to its scanty and little-known river system.

The climate of Argentina varies greatly, as might be expected in a country with a length of nearly 2,300 miles from north to south. In the provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa FÉ, San Luis, Mendoza, parts of Cordoba, and parts of one or two adjoining provinces, the climate is temperate with mild winters and moderately hot summers, while in the north the climate is hot and moist. Towards the south the cold becomes more and more severe, and the winters last from May to the beginning of October. Snow frequently falls. In Buenos Aires the spring begins in September and lasts to mid-December, followed by summer, which extends into March. Autumn lasts till the end of May, and winter occupies the rest of the year. The following table will show that in the city of Buenos Aires itself the extremes are not rigorous:—

The annual rainfall is about 34 inches. But the above table gives only the average temperature. The thermometer in Buenos Aires often rises as high as 100, and in the early mornings of June and July sometimes touches freezing-point. In Mendoza, Cordoba, and Tucuman, and many other places, the mercury frequently falls below 32, while in Patagonia the cold of winter is intense.

The following figures will give a rough idea of the general climate of the Republic:—

On the whole, the climate of Buenos Aires is good, and does not interfere with the comfort or pursuits of a healthy and vigorous man. Its worst feature is the sonda, or north wind, which blows tempestuously chiefly in the winter, and causes rapid fluctuations in the temperature. The winds from the north are always considered unhealthy. In the summer the heat is greatly aggravated by the pamperos—the strong winds from the south-west. But the general climate of the country is dry and invigorating.

It will be noticed that the rainfall is scanty. Unfortunately, nearly all the valuable parts of Argentina have barely sufficient rain, and Mendoza is almost rainless. Irrigation, therefore, is largely used, and when it is extended over the south many millions of additional acres will be brought under the plough. Droughts are by far the most formidable foe of the agriculturist. The Gran Seco of 1827-1832, during which period scarcely any rain fell in the Pampa, destroyed all the vegetation down to the thistles, and caused enormous loss.[11] It is feared that the dry area is extending; but it is fortunate that the magnificent rivers of Argentina would suffice to irrigate every part of the country, and even arid Patagonia has perennial streams. In general, it may be said that the climate of Argentina is far from disagreeable, and highly favourable to health and work.