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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume IV, Issue 13, 16 January 1869, Page 2

We would remind our readers that the mail per Oraeo, will be the last opportunity they will have of sending letters home, by the Suez Mail, leaving Melbourne on the 2nd February. The mail, per Omeo, will not close before Monday morning. An inquest was held to-day, on the body of Ebenezer Enoch Barraclough, whose melancholy death by drowning, we recorded yesterday. No additional particulars, beyond those we then gave, were elicited, and the jury found that the deceased was accidentally drowned. The Stormbird was expected in to-day from the North, with more recent intelligence from the front; but up to the hour of our going to press, she had not been signalled. The Harmonic Society gave iheir first private concert this year, in the Provincial Hall last night. To use an Hibernicism, these concert nights are always red-letter days in the estimation of our fair friends, and deservedly so too; for these reunions afford us an opportunity of listening to the Sublime strains of some of our greatest composers, surrounded by an atmosphere in which no discordant element appears. The concert last evening was a great success. Where all is good it seems almost invidious to particularise; but we cannot help paying a special tribute to the singing of the Trio, Sweet is the breath of life : the chorus, Awake! the starry midnight hour: Sing me a merry lay: and The Erie King. The audience manifested the delight they experienced by frequent bursts of applause. The performances of the band were very good, the style in which they executed Arditi's beautiful waltz, II Bachio, and the Lucrezia Borgia Quadrille, would have done credit to a much older Society than theirs. Altogether it was a most enjoyable concert, and our only regret is that we have not more of them. ii. D'Heureuse, of San Francisco, has patented a process of extracting gold with zinc. His circulars, which are extensively circulated at the Fair, contain the following statements concerning his invention. He says: — When we fairly examine the retentive faculty of quicksilver for gold, we find it very limited indeed; that the affinity acts only on a perfectly pure surface of both — a minority of cases, in reality; and that a reduction in temperature so greatly reduces the affinity that it hardly exists below a temperature of 45deg. Fahr. The result is that, on an average only one half, or thereabouts, of the gold is extracted by quicksilver from the ore; the rest is either carried away as float gold by the water required for the batteries, or remains in the tailings. The process invented by him consists simply in gradually introducing the gold-bearing pulverised substance, below the surface, into a bath of melted zinc, which will immediately attack and dissolve nearly or every particle of gold, while the debris rises to the surface to be taken off. The mechanism is very simple and durable. Should sulphurets, in which particles of gold are so firmly imbedded as not to ofiel: any contact even on the smallest point, prevent the extraction to such a degree that it will pay to work it over by concentration, roasting, and chlorination, it may be done. But all gold lost in another manner, as gold float and much more, is certainly already saved by the zinc. Dry crushers to be used in preference. — Bulletin. Tom Moore, the poet, used to tell a good story of a gentleman who, when he was short of money, and his relatives were stingy and refractory, used to threaten his family with the publication of his poems.