NEW MODE OF EXTRACTING GOLD.

Evening Star, Volume VII, Issue 1926, 8 July 1869, Page 2

NEW MODE OF EXTRACTING GOLD.

A correspondent of a Newcastle-qpon-Tyne newspaper, in connection with the gold discoveries in Scotland, proposes the following mode of separating the most minute portions of gold from quartz, granite, or other rock :—First, let the rock be roasted at a red heat, as is practised with regard to flints intended for pottery ware. This roasting readers it easy to break the rock afterwards by a hqinmer into piepes abpnt |he size of small apples. In this state the rock must be placed in a large earthenware tube, previously fixed in a furnace, so that the tube passes horizontally through the furnace, and leaves its two ends open to the air, The kind of tube here indicated may easily be understood by supposing a co.mmon earthenware gas retort open at both ends, and set in a furnace, as is done in gas making, but with both ends projecting from the furnace. The heat in the interior of this tube must be what is called a bright cherry-red, or incipient white heat. If under these conditions we now pass through a tube a current of chlorine gas, either pure qr mixed with atmospheric aji’, as in the making of chloride of lime, then

the chlorine will combine with and volatilise the whole of the gold existing in the broken rock, and this gold will be carried no further out of the other or open end of the tube than to the part which is at a dull red heat. At this point the whole of the gold will be deposited, for it is a singular fact that although at a white heat chlorine gas combines with gold and renders It volatile, yet by cooling to a dull red heat the two substances separate, and the gold is deposited. And when other metals are present this separation is promoted by passing coal gas into the tube. I do not consider it necessary to dwell upon the methods needed for the subsequent collection of the gold, for these must necessarily vary, according' as the rock contains silver, iron, or other metal. . The object in view is to develop a cheap and easy mode of separating gold from primitive rocks, without incurring either the labor of pulverisation or the expense of amalgamation.