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594 exploration of mineral districts. In later years this branch, which might be called a mining bank, met with reverses, and the college, which depended upon it, could be maintained only with great sacrifices, the expenses amounting annually to about thirty thousand pesos. The Real Seminario de Mineria, as it was proudly called, indeed never fulfilled its object, although for some time it was under the management of able directors and teachers, for it had been founded on a plan too vast and elaborate to be practicable.

The greatest achievement of the tribunal was the compilation of the celebrated Ordenanzas de Minería, which, translated into several languages and widely commented upon, have formed the first complete code of colonial mining laws. For two hundred and fifty years, since Cortés planted the banner of Castile on the ruins of Tenochtitlan till about 1770, the legislation of the mining industry had been ruled by a mixture of decrees and ordinances which had gradually become inapplicable. Therefore when the mining tribunal was created, orders came that it should frame a new code, a work completed in 1779. In August of that