GROWTH OF POPULATION 261 



kilometre. I The density is not appreciably greater in 

 the area of wheat-growing on a large scale, where the 

 extent cultivated by one family reaches, including 

 fallow, 200 hectares. But it may, even apart from 

 the urban population, be more than ten to the square 

 kilometre in the maize belt. 



The growth of the population of Argentina can be 

 followed closely from the middle of the eighteenth 

 century. A Census taken in 1774 gives the Buenos 

 Aires district within the first line of forts 6,000 inhabi- 

 tants. At the end of the eighteenth century (Census 

 of 1797, quoted by D'Azara) the population of the 

 province of Buenos Aires, without the town, was a 

 little over 30,000 souls, the zone occupied having 

 been extended in the meantime, at least in part, as 

 far as the Salado. Woodbine Parish estimates the 

 population at 80,000 in 1824, at the time when the 

 expansion southward, beyond the Salado, as far as 

 the Sierra de Tandil, began. It doubled between 

 1824 and 1855. The northern departments then 

 counted 45,000 inhabitants, the western 58,000 and tne 

 southern 63,000. The density was still a little greater 

 in the north, along tne road to Peru, but the advance 

 of sheep-rearing in the south was beginning to change 

 the centre of gravity of colonization. The first regular 

 Census of the Argentine Republic in 1869 showed a 

 still more rapid advance. The population of the 

 Buenos Aires province had grown to 315,000 inhabi- 

 tants. The increase was greatest in the west, where 

 tillage began to extend round Chivilcoy, beyond the 

 pastoral area, and in the south, where sheep-farms 

 multiplied. The population of the southern depart- 

 ments more than doubled in fourteen years (137,000 

 inhabitants to 70,000 square kilometres in occupation, 

 or two to the square kilometre). 



However, the Pampean region — Buenos Aires (includ- 



' The density is twenty times less in the ranches which use the 

 meagre pastures of the Rio Negro. 



