Mining in Peru is not what it was in the time of Spain. A wealthy company of United States capitalists, it is true, ships great quantities of copper from the wonderful deposits of Cerro de Pasco, 15,000 feet above sea-level, and there are many smaller concerns of varied nationalities. But thousands of irregular subterranean workings all over the vast Cordillera remain waterlogged and abandoned--mines where the visitor is told of fabulous wealth extracted, and which still contain untold riches, awaiting the time when they shall be called upon to surrender their hidden stocks of gold and silver, of copper and a host of other minerals. The glories of Potosi have in large measure departed, but the tin mines of Bolivia yield annually a large proportion of the world's supply of that metal. Enormous coalfields--notwithstanding that South America has been regarded as a coal-less continent--exist in the Andes, their upturned strata outcropping in the bleakest regions, in some cases amid the perpetual snow. To-day the cultivators of sugar and cotton in the irrigated valleys of this vast littoral have come into their kingdom, reaping, during the war, fortunes from the shipment of these commodities to Britain; their only plaint that of the restriction of carriage. The merchant and the shopkeeper made the same lament, and the fashionable and _simpatica_ dames of Latin American Society bewailed the impossibility of their enjoyment of the latest Parisian modes. Away on the slopes and tablelands of the grim Cordillera the ancient palaces and temples of the bygone Incas look down, unknown, unvisited, save by those whom interest or chance may take that way. Once washed by the waves of Lake Titicaca--that most remarkable of lakes, 12,500 feet above the sea, yet whereon we may journey out of sight of land--lie the ruins of that strange temple of Tiahuanako, of unknown age, the most ancient handiwork of man in the New World. To-day, all that remains of that epoch are these old stone structures, save that the Indian, as evening falls, preserving some sentiment of an ancient state, climbs the lonely hills, and there, alone, makes mournful music with his flute of reeds: notes which fall weirdly upon the ear as we pass beneath, across the wide plateau. The empire of the Incas lay principally in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, and extended to the northern part of Chile, but the Incas did not overcome the Araucanian Indians--fierce and intractable--who dwelt in Chile. Nor did they, apparently, descend very much beyond the eastern slopes of the Andes, into the forests and plains of the Amazon and of the Plate, though there are some vestiges of their occupation there. They established a line of forts, of blocks of squared stone along the _ceja_, or edge, of the Montaña, some of which we may see to-day, doubtless to ward off the attacks of the forest savages.