lthiness of the climate, the death-rate
is high, especially in the large cities. In Santiago and Valparaiso the
death-rate sometimes rises to 42 and 60 per 1000, and infant mortality
is very high, being 73% of the births in some of the provincial towns.
This unfavourable state of affairs is due to the poverty, ignorance and
insanitary habits of the lower classes. The government has made repeated
efforts to secure immigrants from Europe, but the lands set apart for
immigrant settlers are in the forested provinces south of the Bio-Bio,
where the labour and hardships involved in establishing a home are
great, and the protection of the law against bandits and criminal
assaults is weak. The Germans have indeed settled in many parts of these
southern provinces since 1845, and by keeping together have succeeded in
building up several important towns and a large number of prosperous
agricultural communities. One German authority (Hueber) estimates the
number of Germans in two of these provinces at 5000. The arrivals,
however, have been on the whole discouragingly small, the total for the
years 1901-1905 being only 14,000.

Although Chileans claim a comparatively small admixture with the native
races, it is estimated that the whites and creoles of white extraction
do not exceed 30 to 40% of the population, while the _mestizos_ form
fully 60%. This estimate is unquestionably conservative, for there has
been no large influx of European blood to counterbalance the race
mixtures of earlier times. The estimated number of Indians living within
the boundaries of Chile is about 50,000, which presumably includes the
nomadic tribes of the Fuegian archipelago, whose number probably does
not reach 5000. The semi-independent Araucanians, whose territory is
slowly being occupied by the whites, are concentrated in the eastern
forests of Bio-Bio, Malleco and Cautin, all that remains to them of the
Araucania which they so bravely and successfully defended for more than
three centuries. Their number does not much exceed 40,000, which is
being steadily reduced by drunkenness and epidemic diseases. A small
part of these Indians live in settled communities and include some very
successful stock-raisers, but the greater part live apart from
civilization. There are also some remnants of tribes in the province of
Chiloe, which inhabit the island of that name, the Chonos and Guaytecas
archipelagoes and the adjacent mainland, who have the reputation of
b