Woodland mantles the mountain slopes for hundreds of miles toward the north, where it merges into the Chaco gallery forest, and extends also toward the south, where it ends in patches and narrow belts as the mountains become corre- spondingly dry in that direction (Fig. 86, p. 253).
A Cross Section of Argentine Life
To go from Buenos Aires with its forest of spars in crowded ship basins, its beautiful plazas and avenues, and its modern facilities of every kind, out across the pampas to the city of Tucuman with its sugar industries and then up into the forest country and above it to the pasture land of the mountain zone, finally to reach the primitive habitations in the secluded valleys of the Puna de Atacama, is to see in cross section the life of Argentina. As a geographical picture it is unrivaled. It is, above all, a strongly featured section of life but little disturbed by eddies and cross currents such as one may see in the life of the United States. Argentina has no coal fields, and but very little oil has been discovered up to this time. Its forests are without exception in distant places. Their woods are of relatively little value for building purposes; they could not begin to supply the demand for lumber on the pampas and in the cities of the coast. Lumber and timber are imported from Scandinavia and from California, Oregon, and Washing- ton. Lumber is one of the principal items of trade at the port of Buenos Aires. Argentina, still for the most part in the ex- tractive stage of industry, has no manufacturing belt like Eng- land, the United States, Germany, and France, where groups of distinctive industries have been developed in close associa- tion with supporting mineral resources. Cornfields, wheat- fields, alfalfa fields, fenced range, and after that open country of little value, semiarid as to climate; meager as to resources— this is the succession as one leaves the coastal towns. Then comes the mountain border of the plain, where irrigation brightens the landscape—a fertile belt, rich, specialized, accessible from the plain yet fed with water from the moun- tains. The sugar belt of Argentina is here. It runs from
