The daily morning journal and courier., 1899-03-01
GOLD MAY BE IN WATER V
 DRINK.

of Gold From Sea Water-Freaks of | Natures Chemistry.
 | The recent collapse of company or
 ganized for the purpose of extracting | gold from sea water has drawn atten-
 ton to very interesting question. Many people have doubtless smiled at
 what they supposed to be the creduity
 which could imagine such a process
 possible; but, as matter of fact, it is,
 though the expense would far exceed any possible return.
 1 It has been demonstrated by many eX periments that sea water carries gold,
 but it has not been proved that all sea
 water carries gold in equal quantities.
 In fact, it has been found by experi-
 ments that sea water on the Pacific coast carries more gold in some locali-
 ties than it does in others. All the ex-
 periments so far with sea water have 1 been made with water taken from the | surf, which does not prove that water | taken from mid-ocean would carry the same quantity of gold Books tell us
 that the chloride of gold is never found l in nature; that all gold in it's natural | condition is in a metallic state: yet all
 
 receptacle for all mineral salts. If this is true, it is natural to conclude that it contains the soluble salts of gold For,
 although soluble gold may never have
 been found in nature, gold is found in nature in such a condition as makes it subject to those natural laws which gov- ern other minerals that are soluble. Professor Sanstadt, a high authority, found from careful experiments with the sea water of Ramsey bay, Isle of Man, that sea water taken from the surf in that locality contains little less
 than grain of gold to the ton. He does not tell us whether it was the solu-
 ble salts of gold he found or metallic gold. Fresh water as well as sea water contains gold. In fact the water in all the rivers which drain regions where mining is carried on contains more or less gold. Careful experiments with the water from many wet free gold crushing mills in California have demonstrated that fully five per cent. of the gold con- tained in the ore, after passing over all the gold saving appliances, is held in suspension in the water and lost. Fully five per cent. of all the gold contained in duTllGIOuS BIdFSl WOIheu By fly miners is lost in the same way. The slickens, as miners call the waste mate rial which has filled the beds of the riv- CTS and overflowed the valley lands many miles from the hydraulic mines, all contains gold in much greater quan- titles than sea water does.
 Tn making experiments in Placer county, Cal, with a wet crushing mill, with view to saving a larger percent age of the gold, l carefully sampled and assayed the ore After passing through the mill the tailings were carefully com pounded. At the end of two weeks run the mill was cleaned up. I found that had saved sixty-five per cent. of the free gold in the battery and on the copper plates. After sampling the as saying and tailings and concentrates I found a loss of fully ten per cent. that could not be accounted for. Then as the water which contained the pulp came from the mill I conducted it into tank, giving all the pulp that did not float time to settle. A sample of this water, analysed by Kustel in San Francisco, showed that it contained fully five per cent. of the assay value of the ore This was assuming that I had used ten tons of water to one ton of ore, which was about the correct proportion. Fur ther, to illustrate the manner in which water will hold metallic gold in suspen- sion, take nugget of pure gold and rub it on clean whetstone until there has been rubbed off of the nugget one pen- nyweight of the gold, which will adhere to the stone. Take a quart of clear water in a porcelain dish and wash eve ry color of the gold from the stone into the water and you will see scarcely any change in the color of the water. Agi- tate the water and every ounce of it will be found to contain an equal pro- portion of the gold. A skllful chemist can take this gold out of the water and give it to you in gold button, without any except a mechanical loss. Take this same pennyweight of gold and dis solve it with aqua regia and form the chloride of gold. If this is dissolved in one hundred gallons of clear water, each drop of the water will contain an equal | portion of the gold, which can again be | brought back into metallic state. It is | therefore plainly to be seen that the gold | found in sea water can be in the form of 1 a chloride of metallic gold,
 To illustra te still further the manner n which gold will float in water or in air, take the tellurite of gold, which has oeen found to contain as high as fifty seven per cent. of pure gold without showing a trace of metallic gold under he most powerful glass. Pulverize it lntil it will pass through a one hundred md twenty mesh screen and you will ind that very large percentage of it will float in water. Subject it to heat in m open smelling furnace and the tellu- 'ium will fuse at about eight hundred md fifty degrees. Continue to raise the and you will find that be- ore a tempera ture at which gold will use has been reached, the greater DOT ion of the gold will pass off with the ellurium in yellow vapor. The smelt- ITS in Colorado, after handling this class f ore in large quantities for many years, inally made the discovery that they lad been losing from five to ten per ent. of the gold, which had passed off n the vapors from the smelters. Many f the large smelters have constructed ues on the ground; some of them are a uarter of mile in length. In these ues there are large chambers, in which he fumes are condensed and which are wept out once a month. In this way