During Christmas week, in a tiny Indian village near Mexico City, a lonely, pious, middle-aged man sat at a table, holding a sharpened goose quill. Putting down his pen, he sanded the wet ink before re-reading his opening paragraph: “I, Bartolomé de Medina,” he had written, “do declare that I learned in Spain through discussion with a German, that silver can be extracted from ore without the necessity for smelting it, or refining it, or incurring any other considerable expense. Many months had passed since he had successfully amalgamated silver ore with mercury and had named his revolutionary new method the patio process. The startling new method Medina introduced for extracting silver from ore was sorely needed by silver mine owners in the New World. As the nineteenth century went out, modern chemistry provided a more efficient and economically superior process using cyanide for leaching gold and silver from ores.