terest on the capital embarked, it cannot enter into a competition with the wools of Segovia and Castille, of a superior quality, which may be brought to market at as low a rate. From the above details it may be collected, that the provinces, of Peru have to seek riches in the bosom, and not on the superficies of the earth. All those that the mineral kingdom can produce, are to be found in abundance within their confines: alum, copperas, and ochre; crystal, basaltes, and sulphur; the cope, a species of black naphtha, as hard as asphaltum, which, although it has a defect easily to be corrected by blending it with other substances, that of burning the cordage, is employed for maritime purposes instead of pitch; copper, lead, and iron; and lastly, and pre-eminently, gold and silver, the general instruments of equation in every description of commerce.
It is recorded by Llano Zapata, in the discourse prefixed to his Memoirs of South America, that at the commencement of the seventeenth century, eighteen thousand spots of mineral territory, in which were comprehended one hundred and twenty thousand mines, were registered in Peru. Notwithstanding this object of commerce and industry has declined sensibly, for reasons which will hereafter be adduced, the mines, as they are at present worked, yield annually about four millions and a half of piastres in gold and silver, without reckoning the portion of these metals employed in the manufacture of articles of convenience and luxury. As metals, gold and silver have an intrinsic value; the nations which possess them ought accordingly to watch over their increase, in the same way as the husbandman attends to the propagation of his seeds. They neither feed nor clothe;
insomuch
