process of smelting, as practised by the Indians, though extremely rude and imperfect, is adapted to local circumstances. All European attempts to improve the system of smelting in these districts have either totally failed, or in their results have proved less effective than the simple Indian method. The Indian furnaces can, moreover, be easily erected in the vicinity of the mines, and when the metal is not very abundant the furnaces may be abandoned without any great sacrifice. For the price of one European furnace the Indians may build more than a dozen, in each of which, notwithstanding the paucity of fuel, a considerably greater quantity of metal may be smelted than in one of European construction.” At the village of Yauli, near the mines referred to, situated at an elevation of 13,100 feet above the sea, from twelve to fourteen thousand Indians are congregated together, chiefly engaged in mining, after the fashion handed down to them from generations before the Conquest. Their processes correspond with the imperfect results disclosed by the analysis of native alloys; as well as by other proofs that the Peruvians were also accustomed to work the native copper into tools and personal ornaments for common use, very much in the same fashion as the ancient metallurgists of the Ohio valley. The contrast which the civilisation alike of Mexico and Peru presents, when compared with the highest arts pertaining to any of the tribes of North America, is well calculated to excite admiration. But the wonder of the Spanish conquerors at their gems and gold, the ready credulity of the missionary priests in their anxiety to magnify the gorgeous paganism which they had overthrown, and the patriotic exaggeration of later chroniclers of native descent, have all tended to overdraw the picture of the beneficent despotism of the Incas of Peru; or the crueller but not less magnificent rule of the Caciques of Mexico. With a willing credulity Spanish historians perpetuated what the Peruvian Garcilasso and the Mexican Ixtlilxochitl related, in their adaptations of native history and traditions to European conceptions. Religious, political, and social analogies to European ideas and institutions, accordingly, strike the modern student with wonder and admiration; nor has the gifted author of the _Conquests of Mexico and Peru_ always sufficiently discriminated between the glowing romances begot by an alliance between the barbarous magnificence of a rude native despotism and the associated ideas of European institutions. The metallic treasures of the Incas of Peru are probably not exaggerated; and if so, the precious metals with which their palaces and temples were adorned would have been the index, in any European capital, of a wealth sufficient to employ the merchant-navies of Venice, Holland, or England in the commerce of the world. But in Peru this was the mere evidence of the abundance of the precious metals in a country where they were as little the