At the time of the opening of Korea by treaty, 1870-80, an impression seems to have prevailed quite generally that the country was extremely rich in gold, that great quantities of the precious metals were soon to be exported, or that mines of great richness would be found and worked. The years that have elapsed since this date have partly served to prove the fallacy of these assumptions, yet the doubt is not yet fully removed. Gold is now known to occur in many places in moderate quantities: in alluvial deposits, from which it may be washed by simple mechanical process, and in quartz veins, from which it is extracted in small quantities by crude and laborious methods of rock-pulverizing and washing. A small constant demand for the metal has always existed, for jewelry and gilding--the latter quite a common decorative process, which up to the present seems to have required the use of pure gold even for the crudest applications. The mines remain for the greater part unworked, however, for three reasons: (1) the native dislike for altering the geomantic conditions of any locality by digging holes in the ground; (2) the laws forbidding the search for the metal, for gold mining in Korea is a government monopoly; (3) the inability of the peasants to find a market for the gold that they surreptitiously work. There has always existed a chance of disposing of it by crossing the border into China, and there has probably long been a small steady export in this way; and a port has been opened near the capital where reside Chinese and Japanese merchants who must find a way of converting the Korean copper cash into some medium of exchange easily negotiable abroad, and who for this purpose have been known to purchase gold from the Koreans at a considerable premium. I have examined a number of specimens of Korean gold which had been brought to Che-mul-po and had passed into the hands of foreign merchants there. In several cases I found small pieces of quartz clinging to flat laminated grains of the metal of considerable size. In answer to inquiries that I made from time to time during a residence of more than a year in Korea I was told by the Koreans of a number of localities where gold was supposed to be abundant. I have endeavored to show these collectively upon a small map (Fig. III) giving the Korean names of the towns and districts with their English equivalents and the names of the provinces of the kingdom in which the places are situated. I was told repeatedly that the metal was most plentiful at Tan-chhön, in the Ham-kiung province. Concerning this locality our Korean geographer says, "at Ma-un, west of Tan-chhön, much gold is found. The mountains there are lofty and precipitous." [Illustration: Fig. III] THE ORDNANCE SURVEY OF GREAT BRITAIN--ITS HISTORY AND OBJECT. BY JOSIAH PIERCE, JR. I. THE INSTITUTION OF NATIONAL SURVEYS.