Socavones and the drainage duty in the mining law of New Spain

Roman law made the lower ground receive the water running down from the higher. The mining ordinance of New Spain reversed it underground: the shallower mine that let its waters fall into the deeper one paid to drain them. The commentator who printed the rule at Madrid in 1761 granted it looked unjust before defending it, described the shafts, adits and horse-whims that did the work — two named from Nahuatl — and recorded the English pumping engine that cost 100,000 pesos and vanished.