70 POLITICAL DIVISIONS AND 



perhaps more peculiarly adapted to agricultural improvement than even those of the central 

 provinces ; and still this great body of land is almost untouched by the hand of the husbandman. 

 Here it is that government has been urged to locate the colonists who come from Germany, 

 in accordance with inducements and promises by its agent. Should it be done, there will be 

 interposed between the Creoles and their warlike neighbors a hardy and temperate race, whose 

 industrious and frugal example will do more towards breaking down the jealous pride, warlike 

 propensities, and exclusivism of the Araucanians, than a regiment of missionaries armed with 

 crosses, or twice that number of soldiers in all the panoply of war. At present, the larger 

 cultivated fields are parts of the plain in the departments of Union and Osorno, which are also 

 the most populated portions of the province. Many of these tracts belong to Indians, who 

 acknowledge Chilean authority, and are nominally Christians ; though they neither attend mass 

 voluntarily, nor willingly conform to the Christian law of marriage. Dr. Darwin found them 

 good-sized men, with prominent cheek-bones, resembling the great American family, to which 

 they belong, though with physiognomy slightly different from any tribe he had previously seen. 

 Their expression was generally grave, and even austere, and possessed much character. Those 

 he met on the road had none of that humble politeness he had witnessed in the Chiloe tribes, 

 and were neither inclined to respond to his salutations, nor to acknowledge favors received a 

 deportment which might be construed into honest bluntness, or fierce determination. They 

 cultivate mostly wheat, beans, and potatoes, and have herds of horses and cattle, but are not 

 as wealthy as the independent tribes. With them, as in every part of the globe where the 

 white and red men come in contact, drunkenness and disease have followed, and, as a distinct 

 race, they are rapidly disappearing. 



Flax, barley, peas, and grapes- are also cultivated; the juice of the latter being made 

 into chicha, wine, and aguardiente. But the great crop for chicha is apples, of which an 

 amazing quantity are grown, and there is probably no part of the world where the trees thrive 

 better or with less trouble. Nor is the manufacture of chicha the only use to which this 

 fruit is applied. By one process they extract a white and finely-flavored spirit from the refuse 

 pulp ; by another, a sweet syrup, or, as they call it, honey ; and their children and pigs seem 

 almost to live in the orchards when the fruit is ripening. Though not so numerous in pro- 

 portion as in the more populous districts, their herds of cattle are rendered more valuable. 

 Few of the cows of the north give milk ; here the greater abundance of nutritious pasturage 

 all the year increases the lacteal secretion : larger numbers are kept for dairy purposes, and 

 cheese forms one of their principal articles of domestic export. 



Although there are frequent reports of the discovery of mines, Dr. Philippi had not found 

 any traces of auriferous deposites in the partial examination which he made of the coast range 

 near Valdivia. Iron pyrites abounded, and coal or rather lignite formations are frequent. 

 He had found one on the road between Valdivia and Osorno, of which the stratum was of great 

 extent and thickness, and there are two or three others in the same department near the mission 

 of San Juan. That the more precious metals abounded during the middle of the sixteenth 

 century, we have ample historical evidence ; and present ignorance of the mines from which 

 they were drawn is to be attributed solely to the jealous care with which the natives have con- 

 cealed them. 



The forests of Valdivia have hitherto proved its greatest source of wealth. Here the Araucaria 

 disappears, and the Alerce, a sort of cypress, takes its place. In some parts of the Andine 

 woods, they are said to attain diameters of *7 to 10 feet, five feet above the ground, and grow 

 80 or 90 feet without a branch, above which the summit rises 50 feet more. The tree has short, 

 stout branches, with leaves of a bluish-green color, like those of the pine, but which are only 

 half an inch in length and one twentieth of an inch wide. The color of its wood is a darker 

 red than the heart of cedar, and becomes nearly the color of slate after exposure to the weather. 

 Like cedar and cypress, it is somewhat odorous, and as its grain is remarkably straight, with 

 the aid of iron wedges the natives are able to split it into thin planks. These, some four feet 



