Sayfa 404 / 2651

But the relative values of those two different species of food,

bread and butcher's meat, are very different in the different

periods of agriculture. In its rude beginnings, the unimproved

wilds, which then occupy the far greater part of the country, are

all abandoned to cattle. There is more butcher's meat than bread;

and bread, therefore, is the food for which there is the greatest

competition, and which consequently brings the greatest price. At

Buenos Ayres, we are told by Ulloa, four reals, one-and-twenty

pence halfpenny sterling, was, forty or fifty years ago, the

ordinary price of an ox, chosen from a herd of two or three

hundred. He says nothing of the price of bread, probably because

he found nothing remarkable about it. An ox there, he says, costs

little more than the labour of catching him.