OLD

OLD, the most valuable of all the metals, is of a bright yellow colour when pure, but becomes more or less white in proportion as it is alloyed with other metals. It is the herest of all the metals, platina only excepted.

Native gold is found in veins, but these are seldom or never very large. It is generally very minutely disseminated, and can only be detected by washing the pulverized mineral strata in which it exists, such as the sand of rivers, and the mould of valleys and plains, whither it had been transported by running water. Gold is obtained from the alluvial soils of several islands in the Indian Ocean; from several parts of Africa, a part of which is called the Gold Coast, an account of the quantities of this metal formerly found there; from the sands of several European rivers, and also the United States: but by far the greatest quantity of gold is found in the South American mines. Humboldt estimates the average product of gold per annum, of South America and New Spain, at nearly 11,000,000 dollars. In Russia and the United States there are also mines of gold. Adding the produce of the American to that of the Russian mines, their total produce during each of the four decennial periods ending with the year 1829, has been estimated as follows by Macculloch, in his Dictionary of Commerce (p. 943):

The gold produced in the United States in 1832 was in value above L.135,000. It is chiefly obtained by washing the soil in the valleys. The produce of the European mines of Hungary, Saxony, and other places, has been somewhat vaguely estimated; but it must be trifling compared with the quantities derived from the new world. With regard to the quantity of gold annually consumed, no correct idea can be formed, because it is utterly impossible to estimate how much of old gold is wrought up in the fabrication of new materials. As to the future supply of this precious metal, it seems probable that it will increase when the anxiety in which the South American states have been so long involved shall terminate.