GENERAL. 7 



frequently lay alongside or discharge their cargoes at once 

 on board the foreign vessels in the roadsteads. 



The articles of export, both from Montevideo and 

 Buenos Ayres, are chiefly animal products hides, dry and 

 salted, jerked beef, bones, horns, tallow, hair, wool, skins, 

 ostrich feathers, &c. Tobacco and some other vegetable 

 products are also exported, but in comparatively insignifi- 

 cant quantities ; also copper and other minerals. This 

 class of products will doubtless form a comparatively 

 larger proportion of the exports than at present, when the 

 communication with the interior provinces is established 

 by means of the railway now in course of construction, 

 and by the canalisation of rivers which flow from there to 

 the Parana. 



The scene at the ' Saladeros,' in the killing season, is 

 strange in the extreme to European eyes. Herds of fine 

 semi-wild cattle, consisting of several hundred head, are 

 driven in from the country by mounted herdsmen, looking 

 as wild, if not really so, as the cattle they drive the 

 affrighted animals bellowing and making desperate at- 

 tempts to break away as they approach the pens the 

 mounted herdsmen swinging their lassoes and dashing at 

 the cattle on flank and rear, to close them into a compact 

 phalanx, so as to force the foremost on. The slightest 

 break in the mass, from an inequality of pressure, through 

 which an animal or two can contrive to turn, and there is 

 a wheel and a stampede : and then look out ! away go 

 the gaucho drivers, as if fleeing before the galloping, 

 maddened herd ; but, with their fleet horses, crossing 

 and recrossing in front and on the sides, they gradually 

 close up the ranks, succeed in turning the cattle again, 

 and so work them till they get them into the pens (corrals) 

 of tall hard wood posts, six to eight inches in diameter, by 

 eight or ten feet high, ranged along side each other, and 



