The same metalliferous chain of the Andes extends, according to Gillies, with little interruption, from Chile to Peru, and contains the greater part of the gold and silver mines yet known on the eastern ranges of the great Cordillera, including, besides those of Uspallata, the mines of the province of San Juan, and further north those of Famatina in La Rioja. It is separated from the central ridge of the Andes by an extensive valley, or succession of valleys, running northwards from Uspallata, through which it is said that an ancient road of the Peruvians is to be traced at the present day nearly to Potosi; a point well worth the attention of the antiquarian, and of great interest, as connected with the state of civilization which the aborigines had attained before their conquest by the Spaniards. The population of the province of Mendoza is calculated to be from 35,000 to 40,000 souls, about a third of which is resident in the city and its immediate vicinity. The executive power is vested in a Governor, periodically chosen, as in the other provinces, by the Junta, or Provincial Assembly. A visible improvement has taken place in the condition of this people in the last twenty years; for, although at so vast a distance from the Capital, like Salta, its position as a frontier town has given it some special advantages: it has led to communications with foreigners, and to a traffic with Chile and with Buenos Ayres, which, by teaching them the value of their own resources, has roused a sort of commercial spirit amongst the inhabitants, and has stimulated them to more industrious habits. The government has taken pains to establish schools for the education, of all classes, and the setting up of a printing press, from which has issued an occasional newspaper, has been of great use, not only in opening the eyes of the people at large to the proceedings of their own rulers, but in furnishing them with some notion as to what is going on from time to time in other parts of the world. They are, in general, a healthy and well-conditioned race: descended many of them from families originally sent from the Azores by the Portuguese government to colonise Colonia del Sacramento on the river Plate, and made prisoners and settled in those remote parts by Cevallos, during the war which preceded the peace of 1777. It is probably much owing to them that the cultivation of the vine has been so extensively introduced in this part of the Republic.