than twenty thousand measures[1] of corn. Throughout the extent of the kingdom, it is added, from eight to ten thousand square leagues of the richest land in Europe lie without culture.
Such a reduction of the ancient population must he highly detrimental to the prosperity of Spain; but that of Peru being still more considerable, is attended by more serious losses, and renders the application of a remedy proportionably difficult. In the enumeration which was made in 1551, by virtue of a royal mandate, the commissioners appointed for that purpose returned eight millions two hundred and fifty-five thousand Indians of either age and sex; but as the population of the provinces which now form the viceroyalties of Santa Fé and Buenos-Ayres was comprehended in this number, the aggregate amount does not militate against the principle which it has been the aim of this dissertation to establish, that America has always been a country thinly peopled.
The depopulation which is so much to be deplored, has been, however, accelerated in an extreme degree, by the multiplied causes which, in two centuries and a half, have united to contribute to the extermination of the Indians. The small-pox, unknown in Peru until the year 1588, was the devastating scourge of that nation, as it has constantly been of every uncivilized tribe, the individuals constituting which, expose, by their nudity, the body to the impressions of the air, and acquire, by the use of pigments and oleaginous frictions, to preserve them from the annoying bites of insects, a
- ↑ The measure (fanega), the half of the sextier, weighs about 120 pounds.
