extracted
with indecent haste, form such pages as can never be erased from the
history of metallurgy in the New World.

Yet there is another light in which to regard the picture of Mexican
mining, and remembering that mining operations, whether in the
sixteenth or the twentieth century, whether in Spanish-America or
elsewhere, ever embody conditions of usury and oppression, we may turn
to this more pleasing aspect. For unless under grave oppression, the
native miner, be it on the plateau of Anahuac, or in the Andine
Cordillera, has been a zealous worker. His picturesque surroundings,
simple mode of life, and easy-going disposition, together with the
pervading sentimental attributes which his religion lent, and the sunny
skies under which he toiled, took from mining much of the material
brutality and grey atmosphere which enshroud it in Anglo-Saxon
communities.

Mining was a source of enrichment which appealed strongly to the
Spanish nature, and it must not be forgotten that to the efforts of the
men of Spain the science of mining owes much. And, indeed, these remote
waste places of the earth owe the civilisation they possess to the
early work of these _Conquistadores_. The Anglo-Saxon world prides
itself on the great discoveries and exploitations which have marked
epochs in its gold- and silver-getting history, Australia, California,
Nevada, Africa; but we shall not forget that Mexico and Peru were
yielding up stores of gold and silver centuries before Captain Cook
sailed, or before those historic nuggets were found by accident in
Sutter's mill-stream, in the Californian Sierra region. Scarcely six
years after the Conquest the silver of Mexico was being eagerly sought,
and easily found, with that remarkable _olfato_ possessed by the
Spaniards. Shakespeare was at work, and Drake was voyaging under the
Elizabethan aegis at the time when the great silver mines of the
Mexican Sierra Madre were giving up their rich ores to treatment.

At Guanajuato, one of the most famous of the silver mining centres,
prospecting was begun in 1525, only a few years after the Conquest, and
the mining regions still further away to the north, as those of the
famous Zacatecas and San Luis Potosi, had already been discovered.
History relates that the silver deposits of Guanajuato were discovered
as a result of a camp-fire, made by some muleteers, who found refined
silver among the ashes, melted from the rock beneath! Shortly after the
middle