The illmu, or Bermudiana bulbosa, produces bulbous roots, which are excellent food either boiled or roasted, and are very pleasant in soups.  The liuto produces a bulbous root, which yields a very white, light, and nutritious flour, which is much used as food for the sick.

To these enumerated provisions from the vegetable kingdom, may be added the cuy or little rabbit, Lepus minimus, and the Chilihueque, or Araucanian camel; the flesh of which last affords an excellent food, and its wool furnishes clothing for the natives.  If tradition may be credited, they had also the hog and the domestic fowl before the Spanish invasion.  Besides these, the country produced the guanaco, and the pudu, a species of wild goat, and a great variety of birds.  With these productions, which required only a moderate degree of industry, they subsisted with a sufficient abundance considering their situation and numbers; insomuch that, when Almagro invaded Chili, his army found abundance of provisions to recruit after the famine they had endured in their imprudent march through the deserts intervening between Peru and that country.  With these advantages of abundant provisions in a fertile soil and mild climate, it appears that the first writers who treated of Chili cannot have greatly exaggerated in saying that it was filled with inhabitants at the first arrival of the Spaniards.  Even the circumstance of one language being spoken through the whole country, is a proof that all the tribes were in the habit of continual intercourse, and that they were not isolated by vast unpeopled deserts, as is the case in many other parts of America.

Agriculture appears to have made no inconsiderable progress among the Chilese, who cultivated a great variety of alimentary plants, all distinguished by peculiar and appropriate names, which could not have been the case except in consequence of an extensive and varied cultivation.  They even had aqueducts in many parts of the country for watering or irrigating their fields; and, among these, the canal which runs for many miles along the rough skirts of the mountains near the capital, and waters the lands to the north of that city, remains a remarkably solid and extensive monument of their ingenious industry.  They were likewise acquainted with the use of manure, called vunalti in their language; but, from the great fertility of the soil, little attention was paid to that subject.  They used a kind of spade or breast-plough of hard wood for turning the soil, which was pushed forwards by their breasts.  At present the native Chilese use a very simple plough, called chetague, made of the branch of a tree crooked at one end, having a wooden share and a single handle by which it is guided.  Whether this simple implement has been taught them by the Spaniards, or is of their own invention I know not; but should believe it original, as Admiral Spilsberg observed a plough of this kind, drawn by