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The population of Buenos Ayres and its immediate suburbs, ex- 

 clusive of the country in its vicinity, has been ascertained to 

 amount to upwards of sixty thousand souls. The proportion of 

 females to males is said to be as four to one, but if we take into con- 

 sideration that many men are almost daily arriving from Europe, as 

 well as from the South American provinces, and that under the old 

 government neither the militia nor the marine was recruited from the 

 mass of the population, we shall find reason to conclude that the 

 proportion of the sexes is not so unequal. In the interior the ex- 

 cess of males is very great, for as the lands are granted in large 

 tracts only, and but poorly cultivated, there is no encouragement for 

 the labouring classes to marry and settle upon them. The poor are 

 compelled to remain single from the very bare resources on which 

 they depend for subsistence, and are accustomed to consider the 

 married state as fraught with heavy burthens and inevitable misfor- 

 tunes. It is not uncommon to find estates larger than an English 

 county with hardly more than a hundred labourers upon them, who 

 subsist upon the sale of a little corn, which each is permitted to 

 grow for himself, but only to such an extent as a single man can 

 plough. 



The various races which compose the population are as follow ; 



1. Legitimate Spaniards or Europeans. In Buenos Ayres there 

 are about three thousand ; in the interior the number is very trifling, 

 except in Potosi, which, being a mining country, contains many. 



2. Creoles ; legitimate descendants from Spaniards or Europeans. 



3. Mestizos, the offspring of European and Indian parents. 



4. Indians, almost all of whom have some mixture of Spanish 

 blood. 



5. Brown mixtures of Africans and Europeans. 



6. Mulattos of various degrees. 



All these races intermix without restraint, so that it is difficult to 

 define the minor gradations or to assign limits to the ever-multiplying 

 varieties. Few families are entirely exempt from characteristics of 



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