make the furnaces for the silver high, that the smoke from the ore may be carried up into the air: for it is noisome and pestilential[145].” Then he adds that “some of the copper works are called gold mines, from which people infer that gold was formerly dug from them. Posidonius, when praising the number and excellence of the mines, refrains from none of his wonted rhetoric, but warms up with hyperboles, for he says he cannot doubt the truth of the story that once on a time when the woods caught fire, the earth having been melted, inasmuch as it was permeated with silver and gold, boiled out on to the surface over the whole mountain, and that a whole hill was a mass of money heaped up by the bounteous hand of fortune. And to speak generally (he says) any one who saw these regions would say that they were Nature’s perennial store chambers or Sovereignty’s inexhaustible treasure house. For not merely the surface but the under-soil is rich (πλουσία—ὑπόπλουτος), and with those people it is not Hades who dwells in the region beneath the earth, but Pluto (Πλούτων). So spake he in a fine figure as though he himself too were drawing from a mine his diction in copious store. There was a saying of Phalereus in reference to the eagerness of the miners of Laurium in Attica, that they dug as continuously and earnestly as if they expected to drag up Pluto himself. This saying Posidonius quotes anent the energy and vigour of those who worked the Spanish mines, for they cut deep and winding galleries, and by means of ‘Egyptian pumps’ combated the springs which burst into the workings[146].” So rich were the silver mines of New Carthage (_Cartagena_) that in the time of Polybius (140 B.C.) 40,000 men were employed in working them for the Roman State, and the daily out-put was reckoned at 25,000 drachms, or roughly speaking about 3,000 ounces Troy.