Then, too, though not of course in fabulous amount, the precious metals actually existed in this land. Various of her rivers, such as the Calom or Darro of Granada, the Tagus, the Agneda, and the Sil, rolled down, together with their current, grains of gold. "Les Mores," wrote Bertaut de Rouen of the first of these rivers, "en tiroient beaucoup autrefois; mais cela a esté discontinué depuis à cause de la trop grande dépense qu'il y faloit faire. Il est certain que souvent on prend dans le Darro de petits morceaux d'or, et il y a des gens qui sont accoûtumez d'y en chercher." Centuries before this abbot wrote his book, the Arab author of the geographical dictionary known as the _Marasid Ithila_ had made a similar remark upon this gold-producing stream; and in the sixteenth century I find an Ordinance of Granada city prohibiting the townspeople from digging up the river-bed unless it were to look for gold.[1] Probably, however, and in spite of what some chroniclers suppose, the title Darro is not in any way connected with the Latin words _dat aurum_. [1] _Ordenanza de la Limpieza_ (1537), Tit. 9: "We command that nobody remove sand from the aforesaid river Darro unless to extract gold, in which case he shall fill up the holes he made, or pay a fine of fifty _maravedis_ for damaging the watercourses that enter this city and the buildings of the Alhambra." "Two leagues from Guadarrama," wrote the mineralogist William Bowles, about the middle of the eighteenth century, "opposite the town and in the direction of San Ildefonso, is a deep valley where one notices a vein of common quartz containing some iron. Here, without the use of glasses, I perceived a good many grains of gold.... In Galicia grains of gold are found on sandy hills, and one is astonished to observe the wonderful works carried out by the Romans to bring the sands together, wash them, and extract the precious metal. Local tradition affirms that this precious sand was destined for the purses of three Roman empresses--Livia, Agrippina, and Faustina.... I know a German minister who employed his spare time in washing these sands and collecting the gold." The Romans, it is true, profited very greatly by the native wealth of the Peninsula. Helvius enriched the treasury with 14,732 pounds of Spanish silver bars and 17,023 pounds of silver money; Cornelius Lentulus, with 1515 pounds of gold, 20,000 pounds of bar-silver, and 34,550 pounds in coin. Cato came back from his pro-consulship with five-and-twenty thousand pounds of silver bars, twelve thousand pounds of silver money, and four hundred pounds of gold. Seventy thousand pounds of coined silver fell to the share of Flaccus, while Minutius exhibited at his triumph eight thousand pounds of silver bars, and three hundred thousand pounds of silver coin.