The household _vaisselle_ of the Ynkas consisted of gold and silver, copper and stone. Rivero, analysing Peruvian weapons and tools (hatchets and chisels), found from five to ten per cent. silica: he could not determine whether it was an artificial or an accidental impurity. Tschudi (1841) discovered copper arms in a tomb three leagues from Huaco, and established the fact that the Peruvians used the paddle-sword and the scymitar.[217] A copper axe, found in a Huaca (old grave) at the now well-known Arica, was associated with a thong-sling and with other primitive instruments. The people of New Granada, according to the tale of Bollaert,[218] ‘gilt’ their copper by ‘rubbing the juice of a plant on it and then putting it into the fire, when it took the gold colour’—a process which reminds us of Pliny’s ox-gall varnish. Ecuador forged copper nippers for tweezers. The Chitchas, or Muiscas (i.e. men), of Bogota, who knew only gold and ignored copper, tin, lead, and iron, made their weapons and tools of hard wood and stone. Thomas Ewbank,[219] of New York, catalogues as breast-plates two laminæ of copper and one of bronze, the latter being notably the lighter. Out of sundry ‘bronzes’ from Peru he found four of pure copper. Chile had abundant mines of copper, and her metal is held to be the toughest: a bar three-eighths of an inch thick will bend backwards and forwards forty-eight times before breaking. Her chief centres are Copiapo (i.e. ‘turquoise’), Huasco, Coquimbo, Aconcágua and Caléo. The Couche range at Guatacondo, in sight of the desert of Atacama, which gave a name to Atacamite (submuriate of copper), is said to supply from the same vein gold, silver, copper, and coquimbite or white copperas called Pampua (packfong?).[220] Gillis (Plate viii. 12, 3) described, amongst the antiquities found near the great Ynkarial High-road, a cast copper axe, weighing about three and a quarter pounds: he doubts, however, that the ancient Chilians worked in that metal. The wild Araucanians called gold ‘copper’ (Bollaert, p. 184). According to Molina, the Puelche tribe extracted from the mines of Payen a copper containing half its weight (?) in gold; and the same natural alloy was found in the Curico mines. [Heading: _COPPER._]