Higher sympathies, however, than such as emanate from mere pecuniary considerations, must be awakened when it is remembered, that from a corner of this department the voice of Christianity has penetrated into vast regions of heathen and savage tribes, and reached the unsettled wanderers among the thickest entanglements of the woods, which occupy a great portion of the widely extended missionary territory of Peru. From Ocopa issued forth those zealous, persevering, self-denying, and enduring men, the great object of whose lives it has been, in the midst of danger, and in the name of the Saviour, to add to the faith of the church—and to civilized society—beings whose spirits were as dark and uncultivated as the woods they occupied from the confines of the rivers Mantaro and Apurimac on the south, to the river Marañon or Amazons on the north, and from the frontier provinces of the department of Junin on the west, to the great river Ucayali on the east. The missionary college of Ocopa is situated in latitude 12° 2´ south, in the province of Jauja, and at the distance of about twelve leagues to the south-east of Tarma. It was founded in the year 1725 by the commissary of the missionaries, Frater Francisco de San Joseph, with the intention of establishing missions for the conversion of the Indians, who ranged the wild frontier-land we have just alluded to. In the years 1757-8, it was erected by a bull of his Holiness Clement XIII. and schedule of his Majesty Ferdinand VI. into a college _De Propagandâ Fide_.[17]