18 Extracts from an Itinerary of a Journey in Spain. 
lines of communication. For several years past, Madrid has main- 
tained a regular correspondence with most of the provincial capitals ; 
the road from Bayonne to Cadiz, is as good as any on the continent, 
and might be travelled with the same celerity as the best regulated 
roads of France, if old customs and unfounded fears did not oppose 
the travelling by night. The time ‘is doubtless not very distant 
when’Spain will become the most interesting portion of a continen- 
tal journey, and will take from Switzerland and Italy the supremacy 
which they have so long enjoyed. 
The retrograde march of this country in internal improvement, has 
within ten years been arrested. Her mining industry, especially, 
has been very instrumental in effecting this pacific revolution. 
Spain has been celebrated, for many ages, on account of her min- 
eral riches. Next to Italy, Pliny regarded this country as the most 
beautiful province of the Roman Empire. He relates that in his 
day, mines of lead, tin, iron, copper, silver, gold and mercury were 
explored to a great extent. The Moors, who were no miners and 
who rarely ever employed hewn stone in the construction of their 
edifices, gave no impulse to this activity, but yet they continued in 
operation several mines in the west of the Peninsula. But the con- 
querors of these people destroyed almost every vestige of this spe- 
cies of civilization, and the discovery of America gave a final blow 
to the art of mining in Spain. With a view to favor the search 
after the precious metals in the new world, the king of Spam inter- 
dicted by severe penalties, the working of mines in the Peninsula, 
reserving only an exclusive privilege which they sometime hired to | 
individuals. 
The quicksilver mines of Almaden, whose produce was absolutely 
necessary to the exploration of the precious metals in New Spain, 
remained almost the only ones in operation, and sent every year to 
Mexico, from five to six thousand quintals of mercury. About the 
middle of the last century, a quicksilver mine in Peru, having be- 
come exhausted, a fresh activity was given to those of Almaden, 
which extended the annual production to eighteen thousand quin- 
tals. Various causes, however, chiefly political, again interrupted 
the mining progress, so that in 1820, with the exception of Alma- 
den, the iron mines of Biscay and a few others, the search for met- 
als was in a state of complete neglect. 
The country, however, about this time, became awalveiiedl to the 
danger, and on the 4th of July, 1825, a mining law .was enacted, 
