Getting Gold: A Practical Treatise for Prospectors, Miners and Students — John Shaqi
Getting Gold: A Practical Treatise for Prospectors, Miners and StudentsJohnson, J. C. F. (Joseph Colin Francis)
History
Getting Gold: A Practical Treatise for Prospectors, Miners and Students
Johnson, J. C. F. (Joseph Colin Francis)
Gold mines and mining
When the lode is really rich, particularly if it be carrying coarse
gold, and owing to rough country, or distance, a good battery is not
available, excellent results in a small way may be obtained by the
somewhat laborious, but simple, process of "dollying." A dolly is a
one man power single stamp battery, or rather an extra sized pestle and
mortar (see "Rules of Thumb").
Silver lodes and lodes which frequently carry more or less gold,
are often found beneath the dark ironstone "blows," composed of
conglomerates held together by ferric and manganic oxides; or, where
the ore is galena, the surface indications will frequently be a whitish
limey track sometimes extending for miles, and nodules or "slugs" of
that ore will generally be found on the surface from place to place.
Most silver ores are easily recognisable, and readily tested by means of
the blowpipe or simple fire assay. Sometimes the silver on being tested
is found to contain a considerable percentage of gold as in the great
Comstock lode in Nevada. Ore from the big Broken Hill silver load, New
South Wales, also contains an appreciable quantity of the more precious
metal. A natural alloy of gold containing 20 per cent silver, termed
electrum, is the lowest grade of the noble metal.
Tin, lode, and stream, or alluvial, occurs only as an oxide, termed
cassiterite, and yet you can well appreciate the compliment one Cornish
miner pays to another whose cleverness he wishes to commend, when he
says of him, "Aw, he do know tin," when you look at a representative
collection of tin ores. In various shapes, from sharp-edged crystals to
mammillary-shaped nuggets of wood-tin; from masses of 30 lbs. weight to
a fine sand, like gunpowder, in colour black, brown, grey, yellow,
red, ruby, white, and sometimes a mingling of several colours, it does
require much judgment to know tin.
Stream tin is generally associated with alluvial gold. When such is the
case there is no difficulty in saving the gold if you save the tin, for
the yellow metal is of much greater specific gravity. As the natural tin
is an oxide, and therefore not susceptible to amalgamation, the gold can
be readily separated by means of mercury.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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