Page:The Present State of Peru.djvu/148

122 hard and callous skin, which prevents the free exudation from the pores requisite to the preservation of health.

The violent labours in the mines; the immoderate introduction of spirituous liquors; and the oppressive service of the metas, which, separating the Indian from his little inheritance, and depriving him of the society of his wife and children, forces him to banish himself to a distance of two or three hundred leagues, exposed to all the inconveniences of travelling, and to the diversity of climates, to be buried in the gloomy bowels of the earth, where the air he respires is replete with foul and pestilential vapours;—all these causes have so effectually conspired to their destruction, that the number of Indians of the different classes, sexes, and ages, in the whole of the jurisdiction of the viceroyalty of Lima, does not at this time amount to seven hundred thousand.

A similar depopulation has been observed in the other parts of South America. In the diocese of Mexico, which, according to authentic documents, contained, in the year 1600, five hundred thousand tributary Indians, not more than one hundred and nineteen thousand six hundred and eleven could be found, when an enumeration was made in 1741. The population of the tribe of Los Angeles, which was estimated, at the former of the above epochs, at two hundred and fifty-five thousand souls, was reduced, at the latter, to eighty-eight thousand two hundred and forty. That of Oaxaca, which amounted to a hundred and fifty thousand, was diminished to forty-