In Utah there is a dry bed of an ancient lake, the floor of which may be said to be carpeted with gold; according to a recent report this bed of limestone, eight miles by ten, varying from twenty to forty feet in thickness, and containing gold in proportion running from six to twenty dollars per ton, is an "ideal ore" for treatment by the cyanide process. A number of cyanide mills are now working the deposit, all paying dividends, and it is said that the only limit to output is the capacity of the mills. It is estimated that there are "5,000,000,000 tons of ore in the district, containing $50,000,000,000 worth of gold!" Although this statement is startling, the estimate is not a wild guess, for the blanket of ore has been cut in many places; hundreds of samples have been taken from different depths, and in all cases the finely distributed gold has been found, apparently having been deposited from solution in a mineral water which formed the lake in prehistoric times. A similar deposit of silver was found in New Mexico about twenty years ago and was christened the "Silver Lake" Mine. This was worked profitably until the great fall in price of silver made the operation a losing one. The "blanket" still contains millions of ounces of silver, and it is probable that cheaper methods of recovering the metal from the ore will be devised whenever the price of silver shall have fallen low enough to enable it to take its place among the so-called "economic" metals, having far wider application in the arts than have the precious metals. At present silver holds an unfortunate place "betwixt and between" the precious and the economic metals. Twenty years ago aluminum was more valuable than silver is to-day, and its production was correspondingly limited. Last year the price was reduced to a point which so widely extended its use that the production increased from 1,900 pounds in 1888 to more than 5,000,000 in 1898.