presents a beautiful sight in the galleries where it is worked, on account of the dark red glittering colour of the cinnabar, which is sometimes earthy and sometimes forms compact crystalline masses, or fine crystals mixed with calcareous spar. Often when a hewer detaches a block of ore with his pickaxe, quicksilver masses of the size of a pigeon’s egg roll from a crevice in which they were lodged, and, leaping along the floor, divide into thousands of small drops. This, however, is no loss, for all the rubbish which accumulates in the galleries is carefully collected. The ores are treated in thirteen double distillatory furnaces, called alodels, and yield only ten per cent. upon an average. But the analysis of the ores leaves no doubt that the barbarous apparatus employed in its sublimation causes a loss of nearly one-half of the quicksilver, which is dispersed in the air, to the great injury of the workmen’s health. This apparatus has remained without any material change for the better since the days of the Moorish dominion in Spain. The furnaces are heated with brushwood, particularly with the resinous branches of the _Cistus ladaniferus_, which grows over the greatest part of the surrounding mountains. This dark evergreen shrub often extends over many miles of ground, and when in flower covers the hills with a beautiful snow-white carpet. Formerly only criminals condemned to hard labour for life were employed to work in the mines of Almaden. At sunrise they were conducted from a prison, which still exists, through a subterranean passage into the mines, where they were obliged to toil till evening, when they were led back again to their dungeons, so that they never saw the light of day. After a few years these poor wretches generally died from inhaling the poisonous vapours of the mercury. Reduced to despair, they set fire, at the beginning of the last century, to the galleries, which were then constructed of wood, and thus rendered the mining operations impossible for many years. Since then only free miners are employed, who are well paid, and not allowed to work longer than six hours a day. Most of them, however, die at an early age, between thirty and forty, and those who live longer are affected by a spasmodic trembling, so as to be unable to keep a limb quiet. After the mines of Almaden those of Idria in Carniola are the richest in Europe. This neat little town lies in one of the largest and most picturesqe basins of the Julian Alps. The gigantic and naked rock walls which inclose the sequestered valley are only partially decked along their summits with clumps of firs; but lower down the slopes are covered with beautiful meadows and forests, and here and there on the projecting spurs of the mountains stand picturesque chapels, which serve to heighten the beauties of the magnificent panorama.