Alvaro Alonso Barba, Arte de los metales: metallurgy written at Potosi

The first original treatise on metals written in Spanish, composed by a parish priest in the Andes and approved at Potosi in 1637 by the guild of refiners whose losses it set out to cure. It records a hot amalgamation process its author found by accident in a copper pot, his refusal to keep it secret, the monopoly he was granted and waived, and a chapter on where the quicksilver goes. It is read here in the reprint the Peruvian mining tribunal ordered in 1817, nearly two centuries later.