And Nature, the old nurse, took
The child upon her knee,
Saying, "Here is a story book
Thy Father hath written for thee.""Come, wander with me," she said,
"Into regions yet untrod,
And read what is still unread
In the manuscripts of God."And he wandered away and away
With Nature, the dear old nurse,
Who sung to him night and day
The rhymes of the universe.--_Longfellow._

THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC

The Argentine Republic has an area of one and a quarter million square miles. It is 2,600 miles from north to south, and 500 miles at its widest part. It is twelve times the size of Great Britain. Although the population of the country is about seven millions, only one per cent, of its cultivable area is now occupied, yet Argentina has an incomparable climate.

It is essentially a cattle country. She is said to surpass any other nation in her numbers of live stock. The Bovril Co. alone kills 100,000 a year. On its broad plains there are _estandas_, or cattle ranches, of fifty and one hundred thousand acres in extent, and on these cattle, horses and sheep are herded in millions. Argentina has over twenty-nine million cattle, seventy-seven million sheep, seven and a half million horses, five and a half million mules, a quarter- million of donkeys, and nearly three million swine and three million goats. Four billion dollars of British capital are invested in the country.

Argentina has sixteen thousand miles of railway. This has been comparatively cheap to build. On the flat prairie lands the rails are laid, and there is a length of one hundred and seventy-five miles without a single curve.

Three hundred and fifty thousand square miles of this prairie is specially adapted to the growing of grain. In 1908-9 the yield of wheat was 4,920,000 tons. Argentina has exported over three million tons of wheat, over three million tons of corn, and one million tons of linseed, in one year, while "her flour mills can turn out 700,000 tons of flour a year." [Footnote: Hirst's Argentina, 1910.]

"It is a delight often met with there to look on a field of twenty square miles, with the golden ears standing even and close together, and not a weed nor a stump of a tree nor a stone as big as a man's fist to be seen or found in the whole area."

"To plant and harvest this immense yield the tillers of the ground bought nine million dollars of farm implements in 1908. Argentina's record in material progress rivals Japan's. Argentina astonished the world by conducting, in 1906, a trade valued at five hundred and sixty million dollars, buying and selling more in the markets of foreign nations than Japan, with a population of forty millions, and China, with three hundred millions." [Footnote: John Barrett, in Munsey's Magazine]