GOLD-LEAF, or BEATEN GOLD, is gold beaten with a hammer into exceeding thin leaves, so that it is computed, that an ounce may be beaten into sixteen hundred leaves, each three inches square, in which state it takes up more than 159052 times its former surface.
This gold they beat on a block of black marble, about a foot square, and usually raised three feet high: they make use of three sorts of hammers, formed like mallets, of polished iron: the first, which weighs three or four pounds, serves to chafe, or drive; the second, of eleven or twelve pounds, to close; and the third, which weighs fourteen or fifteen pounds, to stretch and finish. They also make use of four moulds of different sizes. viz. two of vellum, the smallest whereof consists of forty or fifty leaves, and the larger of two hundred; the other two, consisting each of five hundred leaves, are made of bullocks guts well scoured, and prepared. See MOULD.