396 ENGINES FOR SOUTH AMERICA. 



time to go np there. Please to say when and by what ship I 

 shall have the small engines. 



" I remain, Sir, 



" Your very obedient servant, 



"R. T. 



" To MB. JOHN U. RASTRICK, 

 " Jlridgenorth, Shropshire. 



" The copper mine mentioned in my last is improving very 

 fast." 



The strange gentleman referred to was Don Francisco 

 Uville, a person of great influence in Lima, who a year 

 or two before had travelled from Peru to England and 

 back, in search of steam-engines to pump water from 

 the ancient gold and silver mines then flooded and idle. 

 Boulton and Watt, at Soho, on being consulted, dis- 

 couraged the attempt, because of the difficulty of con- 

 veying heavy machinery over mountain pathways, and 

 also because their low-pressure vacuum engine, using 

 steam but slightly above atmospheric pressure, would 

 be much less effective in the comparatively light atmo- 

 sphere on the high summits of the Cordillera Mountains 

 than in England. Uville, who had heard of the 

 wonderful ability of English engineers to construct 

 steam pumping engines, was utterly downhearted at 

 this decision of the great Soho engineers, and while 

 dejectedly wandering through the streets of London, 

 unconsciously gazed into the shop window of Mr. Roland 

 in Fitzroy Square, near the spot on which Trevithick 

 had run his railway locomotive three years before. 1 

 Eumour of passed events may have led him to visit the 

 ground on which had worked a new kind of steam- 

 engine. His searching glance discovered among nume- 

 rous articles for sale, an unknown form that might be 



1 See vol. i., p. 194. 



