PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCXXXIX. MAY, 1852. Vol. LXXI.
GOLD: ITS NATURAL AND CIVIL HISTORY.[[1]][[2]]
The progress of knowledge naturally leads to the discovery not only of new arts, and of new uses for artificial productions, but of new stores of natural wealth in the bowels of the earth itself, and of new methods of extracting and rendering them useful. This last point is amply illustrated by the history of the progressive discovery and development of our own most valuable mineral treasures—the coal and ironstone deposits—which add so much both to our natural resources and to our national strength.
But, independent of the advance of knowledge, the exploration and colonisation of new countries by a civilised race leads of necessity to the discovery of regions rich in mineral wealth, which were unknown before, and brings new metallic supplies into the markets of the world.
When Spain conquered Mexico first, and afterwards Peru and Chili, Europe became flooded with the precious metals to a degree unknown before in the history of modern nations. When Russia began to explore her provinces on the slopes of the Ural, gold-washings were discovered, which have, by their enormous yield, made up for the deficient supply which commotion and misrule in Central and Southern America had caused in European countries. The possession of California by an observant and curious people, of Anglo-Saxon breed, was almost immediately followed by those wonderful discoveries which have made the world ring, and have attracted adventurers from every region. And, lastly, the turning of keen eyes upon river beds in Australia—still less known and examined than almost any district of America without the Arctic circle—has brought to light those vast stores of gold which appear destined to lay the basis of a new empire in the Australian archipelago.
Nor have such discoveries been confined to the so-called precious metals. The advance of North American civilisation towards the head waters of the Missouri has made known abundant mines of lead, which the cost of transport chiefly prevents as yet from seriously competing with European produce along the Atlantic border. The joint march of Canada and the United States along the shores of Lake Superior, has laid open veins of copper of inexhaustible magnitude—on a scale, we may say, in size and richness commensurate with the other great natural features of the American continent;—while, of coal and ironstone, the Central States of the Union are so full, that imagination itself cannot conceive a time when they shall cease to be sufficient for the wants of the whole civilised world.
Men untrained themselves to observe, and ignorant that it is intellectual knowledge which opens and guides the eye, affect to wonder—often, indeed, do seriously wonder—that gold so plentifully scattered over the surface of a country as it is said to be in California and Australia, or sprinkling with its yellow sheen thick veins of snowy quartz, should, for a time so comparatively long, have escaped observation. “What surprises me,” says Captain Sutter, in whose mill-race the gold was first discovered, “is, that this country should have been visited by so many scientific men, and that not one of them should have ever stumbled upon these treasures; that scores of keen-eyed trappers should have crossed the valley in every direction, and tribes of Indians have dwelt in it for centuries, and yet this gold should never have been discovered. I myself have passed the very spot above a hundred times during the last ten years, but was just as blind as the rest of them, so I must not wonder at the discovery not having been made earlier.”[[3]]