roll about on their backs, and kick up the little dumpy
legs that are left them, in the most comical and life-like way. When we
went away we bought the old man's acocote, and carried it home in
triumph, and is it not in the Museum at Kew Gardens to this day? _(See
the illustration at page 36.)_

At the hacienda of Regla are to be seen on a large scale most of the
processes which are employed in the extraction of silver from the
ore--the _beneficio_, or making good, as it is called.

In the great yard, numbers of men and horses were walking round and
round upon the "tortas," tarts or pies, as they are called, consisting
of powdered ore mixed with water, so as to form a circular bed of mud a
foot deep. To this mud, sulphate of copper, salt, and quicksilver are
added, and the men and mules walk round and round in it, mixing it
thoroughly together, a process which is kept up, with occasional
intervals of rest, for nearly two months. By that time the whole of the
silver has formed an amalgam with the mercury, and this amalgam is
afterwards separated from the earth by being trampled under water in
troughs. We were surprised to find that men and horses could pass their
lives in wading through mud containing mercury in a state of fine
division without absorbing it into their bodies, but neither men nor
horses suffer from it.

We happened to visit the melting-house one evening, while silver and
lead were being separated by oxidizing the lead in a reverberatory
furnace. Here we noticed a curious effect. The melted litharge ran from
the mouth of the furnace upon a floor of damp sand, and spread over it
in a sheet. Presently, as the heat of the mass vaporized the water in
the sand below, the sheet of litharge, still slightly fluid, began to
heave and swell, and a number of small cones rose from its surface.
Some of these cones reached the height of four inches, and then burst
at the top, sending out a shower of red-hot fragments. I removed one of
these cones when the litharge was cool. It had a regidar funnel-shaped
crater, like that which Vesuvius had until three or four years ago.

The analogy is complete between these little cones and those on the
lava-field at the foot of the volcano of Jorullo, the celebrated
"hornitos;" the concentric structure of which, as described by Burkart,
proves that they were formed in precisely the same manner. Until
lately, the formation of the great cone of Jorullo was attributed to
the same ki