was disposed of in two ways. The cattle were valued chiefly for their hides, and for a time their bones also had considerable value. ‘Their use for meat and milk was local and insignificant. The rest of the live stock consisted chiefly of horses and mules, and of these the mules were by far the most important, They were bred not for shipment overseas but for use in Upper Peru (now Bolivia) where there had grown up a number of notable Spanish towns dependent on mining. Their great elevation— nearly half the existing towns of Bolivia lic at elevations ex- ceeding 12,000 feet[1]—made life hard not merely for man but also for his beasts. The mines were worked in a primitive man- ner, the towns associated with them were at clevations so great as to limit forage crops. When we consider the primitive min- ing organization of that time we can realize that a town like Potosi, at an elevation of 13,388 feet and with a population by 1650 of 166,000, must have required a horde of mules to per- form the labor of handling the ore, crushing it, transporting the refined product, bringing in merchandise, and for the trans- portation of stagecoaches, and for use as riding beasts. Be- tween the mining towns of the a/tiplane and the cities of the agricultural basins and valleys of the cast like Cochabamba, Sucre and Tupiza, and of the coast valleys like Arequipa, there Was a constant interchange of products, agricultural on the one hand and mineral on the other. Even today with the railroad to Cochabamba, La Paz, Oruro, and Potosi, streams of cargo mules continue to come in from the tributary towns and val- leys; and llama trains likewise and two-wheeled carts, for the cost of carriage on the railroad limits transportation on it to vital necessities and luxuries—-what we might call the over- head business of a region served by a principal town. Wher- ever there are low wages and abundant forage. transportation by pack mules in charge of a muleteer is cheaper than the rail- road, and of course such transportation is still the main dependence for feeding the railroad.
In addition to the interchange of products over the highland trails there was also the transportation of minerals to the
- ↑ Isaiah Bowman: The Distribution of Population in Bolivia, Bull. Geogr. Soc. of Philadelphia, Vol. 7, 1909, pp. 74-93.
