nse harvests and the vast tracts of country awaiting
development, it has become necessary to work on a much bigger scale, and
to bring in the aid of machinery. In some places the ordinary form of
steam plough has presented many practical disadvantages. They are heavy
and unwieldy, and apt to sink in soft ground, from which they are
extricated with difficulty. This is likely to cause damage, or more
serious accidents, through explosion. Further, they require a constant
train of water-carts and fuel wagons, and a staff of at least six
persons to work them. At the spot where this engine was working the
latter objections were obviated, as both wood and water were plentiful.
In general, these difficulties are largely overcome by the adoption of
the naphtha motor engine, which has been brought to a state of
considerable perfection in Great Britain and the United States. It can
be employed not only for ploughing and threshing, but also for traction,
excavation, and embankment work, etc. An engine and plough will break up
one hectarea of camp per hour, and some of these machines with two
relays of workmen will break 108 hectareas per week. In a month of only
twenty-three working days they will break up a league of camp.

[Illustration: _Ploughing Virgin Camp._]

The price of naphtha is gradually decreasing in the Argentine Republic,
and the oil wells of the country will probably make the cost of fuel
even less by-and-by than it is to-day.

Areas of fertile camp, which have hitherto lain fallow, owing to their
being intersected by canadas, and difficult to get at, can now be
treated by the motor plough, with the result that their value will
rapidly rise. In an actual case near the Central Cordoba Railway, people
are to-day offering $118 per hectarea for land which was bought two
years ago for $25 per hectarea, but during the two years it has been
thoroughly ploughed and drained by mechanical means.

In nearly all the northern lands small trees grow irregularly all over
the camp, and in order to plough the land these trees must be dug up.
Machines are manufactured in the United States to deal with land
containing tree roots. They perform the double operation of cutting
roots under ground and ploughing up the surface, but they have not yet
been introduced into the Argentine in large numbers. Other machines dig
holes for fence posts at the rate of fifty holes per hour, and they can
be so accurately gauged that the posts may be f