THE BA TOT/LAS DISTRICT. 321 
pieces of native silver, the richness of the 
ore being unprecedented. I have now 
in my possession ore from Batopilas 
that runs from six thousand to eight 
thousand dollars to the ton, and that 
looks like a mass of solid silver ten- 
penny nails imperfectly fused together; 
so I can readily see how the present of 
solid native silver could have been made. 
In 1790 a royal decree ordered the col¬ 
lection of all data for a history of New 
Spain, and a special commission of scien¬ 
tists was ordered by the viceroy and 
Royal Tribunal of Mines to report upon 
the Batopilas district. There is but one 
copy of the report extant, which I traced 
to the city of Chihuahua. The commis¬ 
sion states that the silver extracted from 
Batopilas in a few years amounted to fifty 
million dollars, not including that which 
