A Trip to Tucuman 281 



pastures. We drove at my command to the river- 

 el rio. i had anticipated from the map that I would 

 find myself on the banks of a considerable stream. In 

 the rainy season there was every evidence that it must 

 be a great body of water which flows down through its 

 bed; but to my horror, when I arrived, where I had 

 expected to see a broad shining river, I discovered 

 nothing but cobblestones and stretches of sand in which 

 dwarfed willows were growing; through the middle of 

 the channel there flowed a highly malodorous stream of 

 sewage about four feet wide, from which I fled incon- 

 tinently. The carcasses of dead animals had been 

 apparently hauled out of town and deposited along the 

 bed of the river, there to decay, and ultimately to be 

 washed away by freshets, which fill the channel in the 

 rainy season. El rio left upon me no memories save 

 that of its extreme putridity. The sanitary condition 

 of Tucuman would be improved by resorting to some 

 more modern method of disposing of the sewage and the 

 carcasses of dead horses and dogs, which are now left to 

 fester under a torrid sun. 



The Province of Tucuman is the center of the sugar 

 industry of Argentina. Under a protective tariff the 

 business has increased greatly in recent years. The 

 area under cultivation has grown since 1872, when it 

 was 2453 hectares, to 72,000 hectares in 1910, of which 

 62,500 equal to about 155,000 acres were planted in 

 the immediate vicinity of Tucuman. The level plain 

 in which Tucuman is located is criss-crossed in various 

 directions by railways, to which the canes are brought 

 when ripe and transported to the factories, where the 

 whole process of making sugar is completed, from the 

 crushing of the canes by powerful machinery, thereby 

 extracting the sap, to the final process of refining. 



