positions--gold exists generally in a condition far from pure; the chemistry of the artisan must do what the chemistry of nature had effected in the other case; and this involves rather an expensive process. Surface gold is found, comparatively pure, in lumps of very various sizes, or in rounded grains, or in small scales. In this state it is found in the Ural district, contained in a mass of coarse gravel, like that found in the neighborhood of London; elsewhere, it is contained in a rough shingle, with much quartz; and elsewhere, in a more mud-like alluvial deposit. The water that has washed it out of its first bed has not been always a mere mountain torrent, or a river, or a succession of rains. Gold shingle and sand have been accumulated in many districts, by the same causes which produced our local drifts, in which the bones of the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and other extinct quadrupeds occur. The nearly pure gold thus deposited in very superficial layers, may be readily distinguished from all other things that have external resemblance to it. Gold in this state has always, more or less, its well-known color, and the little action of the air upon it causes its particles to glitter, though they be distributed only in minute scales through a bed of sand. But there are other things that glitter. Scales of mica, to the eye only, very much resemble gold. But gold is extremely heavy; twelve or nineteen times heavier than that same bulk of water; mica is very light: sand itself being but three times heavier than water. Let, therefore, sand, with glittering scales in it, be shaken with water, and let us watch the order of the settling. If the scales be gold they will sink first, and quickly, to the bottom; if they be mica, they will take their time, and be among the last to sink. It is this property of gold--its weight--which enables us to obtain it by the process called gold-washing. Earth containing gold, being agitated in water, the gold falls to the bottom. Turbid water containing gold, being poured over a skin, the gold falls and becomes entangled in the hairs; or such water being poured over a board with transverse grooves, the gold is caught in the depressions. This is the reason why the Brazilian searcher looks for a depression in the bottom of the river, and this is also the origin of those peculiar rich bits occasionally found in the alluvium of a large gold-field. Where there has been a hollow, as the water passed it, gold continually was arrested there, forming those valuable deposits which the Brazilians call Caldeiraos. Sometimes, where the waters have been arrested in the hollow of a mountain, they have, in the same way, dropped an excessive store of gold. This quality of weight, therefore, is of prime importance in the history of gold; it determined the character of its deposits in the first instance; it enables us now to extract it easily from its surrounding matter, and