number of persons, capable of bearing arms, to be found in Lima, ordered a new enrolment of the population to be drawn up in 1700. It afforded a product of thirty-seven thousand two hundred and fifty-nine inhabitants, including the religious votaries of both sexes, Indians, slaves, &c. We were somewhat surprized to find, in the manuscript work above referred to, in which all the details of this enumeration are given, that either through the inexactitude or insincerity of many individuals, there was the same concealment as in 1600[1]. We shall now proceed to a short comparison between this statement and the one we are about to publish.
Lima has, since that time, been augmented in its extent, its population, and its resources ; with the exception, however, that in certain classes there has been a diminution. For instance, no less than three thousand eight hundred and sixty nuns, and their attendants, were then immured in cloisters. The Monastery of the Incarnation alone contained eight hundred and twenty-seven souls, including four hundred and thirty- four domestics. That of Santa Clara reckoned six hundred and thirty, in which number one hundred and seventy-two nuns of the black veil were comprehended. In the convent of La Concepcion there were one thousand and forty-one inmates, the female attendants alone amounting to five hundred and sixty-one. When these sums are compared
- ↑ However this concealment may have tended to diminish the designated amount of the population, there can be no doubt of an exaggeration on the part of Doctor Montalbo, when, in his work entitled El Sol del Neuvo Mundo (the Sun of the New World), written in 1683, he assigned to Lima a population of upwards of eighty-thousand souls.
