Dr. Latzina then suggests the reservation of two-thirds of that area for stock-breeding, leaving only 50,000,000 hectares for pure agriculture.
However, hardly one-half of this last-mentioned area is as yet under cultivation; leaving plenty of room for the present for the extension of agriculture.
This fact of very large areas within the Territory of the Argentine Republic being, chiefly for climatic reasons (e.g. the more southern and the mountainous parts of Patagonia), unfit for either cultivation or pasturage, except in the latter regard for goats and perhaps the very roughest kinds of sheep, should not be lost sight of when comparing Argentina with Uruguayan statistics. One eminent Uruguayan Agricultural Authority, for instance, has triumphantly referred (in, it must be considered, a more patriotic than strictly scientific spirit) to the fact, as stated by him, that the value of the Exports of Uruguay, per square mile of that Republic’s territory, are double those, similarly reckoned, of Argentina. Even accepting his figures as correct, which Argentine statisticians do not, the deduction he obviously suggests is certainly based on fallacious reasoning; indeed, the very comparison itself is misleading.
Uruguay is a small, compact country not two-thirds the size of the Province of Buenos Aires, containing practically no exclusively mountainous or arid or otherwise desert large areas and none of the obstacles, of distance, or other kinds, encountered by transport in Argentina.
Truly some statistics suggest that their compilers believe that “Figures can be made to prove anything.”
In connection with Agriculture, locusts still unfortunately succeed in not letting themselves be forgotten. From time to time vast swarms of these rapacious insects appear, covering and darkening the sky for leagues. They come from their breeding centres, undoubtedly somewhere in the huge virgin tracts in the western tropical regions of Brazil. Many well-meaning persons have counselled measures for their extermination there. A counsel of perfection, alas! Those who have preached have never been even on the frontiers of the thousands of square leagues of tropical forest and undergrowth which yet have scarcely ever heard the voice of man. To dream of exterminating locusts there is as if one proposed to empty a running stream with a bucket. An impossibility.