The enormous gold-bearing alluvial deposits are generally situated on the most westerly side or summits of the Cordillera, and in the Montaña, and are difficult of access at present in the absence of railways. Various enterprises have been set on foot to win the gold from these in recent years--whether by the method of dredging, whether after the Californian "hydraulic" system--but it is doubtful if they have proved a success, from a variety of causes. There, however, is the gold, awaiting recovery. The reputation for fabulous wealth of silver in the Peruvian mountains has passed into a proverb. Great wealth has been recovered, and the ores are often extremely rich. Myriads of old workings exist, which were abandoned because the more primitive appliances of a past age did not permit the drainage of the mines, which became filled with water; but they are capable of being pumped out. Romantic tales are told of the enrichment of miners who persevered in their labours in some lonely mine and won great fortune. In the many examinations I made here of gold and silver mines in Peru there were found conditions that should well repay modern mining enterprise. There is, of course, a good deal of work being carried on. The great wealth of copper, lead, zinc, quicksilver, iron and coal also present their attractions, and there are rarer metals whose use commerce urgently requires. But foreign capital does not flow very freely to Peru, and Peruvian capital does not seem to have the organizing faculty to develop the mineral wealth of the country for itself. The mining laws of Peru offer considerable privileges to the foreigner, whom the Government is ever desirous of encouraging. The Indian, the native miner, has his own methods of winning the gold from the rocks and gravels, or the gold-bearing streams of the Montaña, or the auriferous earths of the high pampas. In the streams he selects a suitable spot and paves it with large stones. Then, when the floods pass over the prepared surface of rude "riffles," the gold carried down by the waters from the auriferous rocks lodges in the interstices, and, removing the stones, he recovers the precious nuggets and dust. Or, by laborious panning in a _batea_, or wooden bowl, hollowed out of a block of wood, he washes the gravel from the rich banks of sediment, and the gold lies at the bottom. In the case of the gold-bearing ores, he digs shallow pits in the surface of the ledge, where Nature, under the oxidation of the pyrites, has transformed the gold into a form recoverable by the simple method of amalgamation with quicksilver, after crushing the friable quartz under a primitive rocking-stone.