devising other means they get out the gold by washing the sand, and what are called gold washings are now more numerous than the gold diggings. But they say that in the gold dust are found nuggets sometimes even half a pound in weight [Greek: bôlous hêmilitriaias]) which they term palae, which need but little refining, and they say likewise that when stones are split little nuggets like teats are discovered, and when the gold is refined and purified with a kind of earth which contains alum and vitriol, the residuum is electrum. When this residuum, which consists of a mixture of gold and silver, is again refined, the silver is burnt away and the gold remains. But the gold is very fusible, and on this account it is melted with chaff rather than with coal, because the flame being gentle acts moderately upon a metal which is yielding and easily fused, whereas the charcoal causes excessive waste by melting it too much by its violence, and detracting from it. In the river-beds the sand is swept up and then washed in troughs beside the river; or else a well is dug, and the earth that is brought up out of it is washed. They make the furnaces for the silver high, that the smoke from the ore may be carried up into the air: for it is noisome and pestilential[1]." Then he adds that "some of the copper works are called gold mines, from which people infer that gold was formerly dug from them. Posidonius, when praising the number and excellence of the mines, refrains from none of his wonted rhetoric, but warms up with hyperboles, for he says he cannot doubt the truth of the story that once on a time when the woods caught fire, the earth having been melted, inasmuch as it was permeated with silver and gold, boiled out on to the surface over the whole mountain, and that a whole hill was a mass of money heaped up by the bounteous hand of fortune. And to speak generally (he says) any one who saw these regions would say that they were Nature's perennial store chambers or Sovereignty's inexhaustible treasure house. For not merely the surface but the under-soil is rich ([Greek: plousia—hypoploutos]), and with those people it is not Hades who dwells in the region beneath the earth, but Pluto ([Greek: Ploutôn]). So spake he in a fine figure as though he himself too were drawing
- ↑ Strabo, 146.
