ON THE PRODUCTION OF GOLD AND SILVER AND ITS FLUCTUATIONS. by baron alexander von humboldt.

Translated for the Bankers' Magazine, from the Journal des Economistes; March, April, May, 1848.

According to Herodotus (iii. 106) the richest productions have been assigned to the ends of the earth, in the unequal distribution of the wealth and treasures of the soil.

This assertion is made not only upon that mournful sentiment, belonging to the human race, of happiness being always at a distance; but it expresses the fact that the Greeks, inhabiting a temperate zone, received in their commerce with other people, gold and spices, amber and tin, from countries far remote.

In proportion as the commerce of the Phenicians, of the Edomites on the gulf of Akaba [Ezion-geber] and of the Egyptians under the Ptolemies and the Romans, lifted slowly the veil which had so long hung over the coasts of Southern Asia, were received at first hand the products of the torrid zone; and men's lively and active imagination continually carried farther and farther east, the deposites of the metallic treasures of the earth.

Twice, at epochs so important to commerce, (that of the Lagides and of the Cesars) as well as at the close of the 15th century, during the Portuguese discoveries, the same people, the Arabs, showed to the West the route to India.

At this moment, Ophir (the El-Dorado for Solomon) was pushed to the east of the Ganges.

There, was imagined to be that Chrysos, sought so long by the travellers of the middle ages and regarded, now as an island, now as a district of the Golden Chersonese.

The quantity of gold which Borneo and Sumatra still put in circulation, according to John Crawford, accounts for the ancient fame of this region.

Close by Chrysos, country of gold and aim of Indian adventurers, must be found, by necessary relation and a sort of symmetry, according to the then ideas of systematic geography, a country of silver, an island, Argyros; as if to blend the two precious metals--the riches of Ophir and of Iberian Tartessus [Tarshish.]

The geographical myths of classic antiquity are reflected, but with varying phases, in the geography of the middle ages.

In the system of the Arab Edrisi and Bakoui, we find at the extremity of the Indian Ocean, an island Sahabet with sands of gold; and beside it, Saila (which must not be confounded with Ceylon or Serendib) where the dogs and monkeys wear golden collars.

Passages and words in brackets are the Translator's.

To this idea of remoteness, was joined another, as a characteristic sign of the veritable country of gold and of all the precious products of the earth, viz. that of tropical heat.

"Until your Excellency shall have been finding men who are black," writes in 1495, a Catalan lapidary, Jaime Ferrer, to the admiral Christopher Columbus, "you need not expect any great things nor veritable treasures, such as spices, diamonds or gold."

This letter has been recently found in a book printed at Barcelona, in 1845, bearing this singular title:

Sentencias Catholicas del divi poeta Dant.

[Catholic Maxims of the divine poet, Dante.]

The richness of the gold mines of the Ural, which extend in the northern basin of the Volga up to where the ground hardly thaws in the summer months; the diamonds which have been discovered, near 60° N. latitude, on the European slope of the Ural, by two of my companions in the Expedition, which I made in 1829 by order of the Emperor Nicholas, do not, to be sure, exactly support the hypothesis that would connect the existence of gold and diamonds on the one hand, with the heat of the tropics and colored races on the other.

Christopher Columbus, who attached a moral and religious value to gold, since, (says he,) "the possessor of it attains every thing in this world and even can open" (no doubt, by paying for masses,) "the gate of paradise to many a soul," Christopher Columbus, I say, was altogether a partisan of the system of the lapidary Ferrer. He looked for Zipangou (Japan) which then was passing for the golden island Chrysos; and when on 14 November 1492, he was coasting along the island of Cuba, which he considered a part of the continent of Eastern Asia (Cathay), he wrote in his journal:

"Judging by the great heat which I am suffering, the country must be rich in gold."

It was thus that false analogies made men forget what classical antiquity had told us of the treasures in metal of the Massagetae and the Arismaspi in the extreme north of Europe; I say, of Europe, for the flat and desert country of Northern Asia, the Siberia of modern times, passed then with its forests of pine, for a monotonous continuation of the low countries of Belgium, along the Baltic and of Sarmatia.

Reise nach dem Ural, etc. [Journey to the Ural, the Altai and the Caspian Sea; by A. v. Humboldt, G. Rose and G. Ehrenberg,] t. i. p. 352--373.

El oro, (writes Columbus to Queen Isabella,) es excellentissimo, con el se hace tesoro y con el tesoro quien lo tiene, hace quanto quiere con el mundo y llega a que hecha las animas a paraiso.

See upon this gold-eulogy my Examen Critique, etc. [Critical Review of the History of Geography and the Progress of Nautical Astronomy during the 15th and 16th centuries, in fol.] pp. 38 and 131.

Herodotus, iii. 116.

If we glance at once over the whole history of the commercial relations of Europe, we see that antiquity seeks in Asia for the richest sources of gold; while the middle ages and the three centuries since, place them in the New continent.

But in fact, and since the commencement of the 19th century, it is once more in Asia, but only in a different zone, that these richest sources spring.

This change in the direction of the current, this compensation which accidental discoveries in the north afford, when in the south the extraction of this metal seemed suddenly to fall off, calls for a grave and deep research founded upon numerical data; for in political economy, as well as in the study of physical phenomena, numbers are always the most decisive element; they become judges, without appeal and inflexible, of the causes so variously reasoned by political economists.

We learn from the profound researches of Boeckh how, when the Persian wars and the expedition of Alexander to India, had broken down the barriers of the East, gold accumulated by degrees among the European Greeks; how in the times of Demosthenes, for instance, the precious metals were worth five times less than in the days of Solon.

The current then was from the east to the west; and the influx of gold was so great that while, when Herodotus lived, the ratio of gold to silver was as 1:13, it became at the death of Alexander and for a hundred years after, as 1:10.

Economie Politique des Atheniens, vol. i. p. 6-31.

See the learned rectification of the monetary hypothesis of Garnier by Letronne: Considerations, &c. [General Considerations upon the value of the Greek and Roman Money.] 1817, p. 112.

The less general and extensive were commercial relations in the ancient world, the more great and sudden must, of course, have been the variations in relative value of gold and silver.

Thus, in Rome, we find that in consequence of a local accumulation of one of the precious metals, a little while after the conquest of Syracuse, the ratio of gold to silver was as 1:17; while under Julius Caesar, it fell for some time to 1:8 [Formel] .

Also the less the quantity of one metal existing in any country, the more easy it is to produce these enormous fluctuations by an importation from abroad.

The world at present, by the universality and promptness of relations which must balance throughout, and by the magnitude of the existing quantities of gold and silver, tends to maintain a stability in the relative value of the two metals.

After the wars of Independence, the product in metal of Spanish America continued for some years to be only the third of its previous annual mean; and yet it is not to this circumstance even, that we are to attribute the slight oscillations which are manifested here and there.

It is quite otherwise with the ratio of silver to another metal which has been obtained as yet only in small quantity, and which is besides very unequally distributed--I mean, platinum.

We do not find among the ancients any statistical data indicating some general result to be compared with what we know of the actual metallic product of entire countries.

Their administrative policy offered none of those controls which the complex and refined tariffsystem of the Arabs--that commercial people, who calculated every thing and tabulated all--communicated in after-times to the States of southern and western Europe.

The assertion of Pliny (xii. 18,) that the commerce with India, Serica, [China] and Yemen was drawing every year from the Roman Empire a hundred million sesterces in the precious metals, that is to say, according to Letronne, estimating these sesterces according to the value of silver at that epoch, 33000 markweights of silver; (the half only of what the silver mines of Saxony produce annually)--this assertion is isolated and problematical.

In this defect of general results, it would be important to have numerical instances of the partial wealth in money of certain mining districts; which we might compare with the yield of similar regions now, weight for weight in an absolute sense, and without considering gold as the measure in value of determinate quantities of cereal grains.

The treasure which a sovereign leaves as the fruit of conquest or of long exactions, testifies only what may have been accumulated over an indefinite extent of country and in a period which we cannot count.

Results of this last kind may, however, be compared with the data which statists venture to give upon the quantity of precious metals existing in a State at some certain epoch.

Thus Cyrus, in the account of Pliny (xxxiii. 15,) collected from his conquest of Asia, 34000 pounds of gold, not counting what had been converted into plate; and yet this quantity hardly equals the fruit of two years work in the mines of the Ural.

Again, Appian, upon documents, estimates the treasure of Ptolemy Philadelphus at 740000 talents; that is to say, 700 millions of Spanish dollars, if they were Egyptian talents, or 180 millions if they were the smaller talents of Ptolemy.

"This assertion seems fabulous" says the celebrated author of the Political Economy of the Athenians, "but I do not venture to question the veracity of the historian.

In this treasure was a large quantity of gold and silver manufactured.

The States of this Prince were entirely exhausted; imposts and taxes were extorted by greedy farmers-general with arms.

The revenues of Coele-Syria, Phenicia, Judea and Samaria, alone, were farmed out by Ptolemy Evergetes for 8000 talents; and a Jew bought them at a hundred per cent. advance."

Mr.

William Jacob, in an excellent work published at the request of Mr. Secretary Huskisson, under the title of Historical Enquiry on Precious Metals, (vol. i. p. 23,) confirms the assertion of the great German philosopher.

The higher of the two estimates above would approach the quantity of coin actually in circulation in France and Belgium; the lower would nearly equal the coin circulating in England.

According to Strabo, Alexander succeeded in collecting at Ecbatana 380000 talents.

It must not be forgotten, that whilst now, the precious metals are spread more equally over great extents of country and among dense populations; then, they were concentrated at a few points of the earth and in the treasuries of sovereigns.

From the researches of Mr. Michel Chevalier, (Letters on N. America, v. i. p. 394) the coin circulating in France, is valued at 3000 millions and, in England, at 1000 millions of francs.

Neckar had before estimated the circulation of France at 2200 millions of francs; while Adam Smith rates that of Great Britain at 30 millions of pounds sterling only.

In the Prussian States, the circulation is, according to Hoffmann, only from 90 to 120 millions of thalers.

The minting in Prussia from 1764 to 1836, of all kinds of coin, including the fifteenths of a thaler, amounts, subtracting what has been withdrawn during that time by the mint itself, to 182.856.020 thalers.

(Die Lehre vom Gelde, [Science of the Mint, by J. G. Hoffmann,] 1838, p. 171.)

The assemblage of such large sums as these may throw some light upon the data left us by antiquity.

The treasure left by Cyrus was almost three times as large as this. Pliny (xxx. 3,) values it at 500000 talents in gold and silver.

As this treasure may have diminished considerably after the death of Cyrus, Sainte-Croix (Examen Crit. des Historiens d' Alexandre, p. 429,) concludes that the whole of the precious metal which the Macedonian collected in Persia, amounted but to 330000 talents.

Upon the almost unexampled concentration of precious metals in Italy, under the Caesars, see Letronne, u. s. p. 121.

Undoubtedly, the great quantity of gold which was pouring westward, came from the interior of Asia, from the north-north-east of Ladakh [Western Thibet] from the upper part of the basin of the Oxus (between the Hindoo-Khosh and the highlands of Pamez, on the western slope of the Bolor) from Bactriana and the eastern satrapies of the Persian Empire; but it is easier to determine the direction of the current of specie than the particular position of its different sources and their relative abundance.

The place where grew the story of the goldguarding ants, scattered over the mountains of Derden, must be far off from the griffins of the Arimaspians.

This story seems to belong to the plains of Kaschgar and Askou, between the parallel chains of the celestial mountains [the Thian-chan of the Chinese and Mouzdagh of the Turks] and of the Kouenloun where the river Tarim pours itself into the Lop.

We shall recur presently to the Arimaspians dwelling much farther to the north, when we come to speak of the great masses of gold found in the Ural, immediately under the surface.

The fame of the riches of India echoed even as far as Persia; to be there, it is true, very often misinterpreted.

Ctesias, of the family of the Asclepiades, the physician of Artaxerxes Mnemon, describes, almost without being aware, under the image of a fountain of gold, an actual furnace whence the fluid metal run into vases, i. e. into clay moulds.

Nearer to the Greeks were found Lydia channelled with rivers that flow from the Tmolus, Phrygia and Colchis, districts rich in gold.

The nature of the auriferous soil here, so easy to exhaust, explains to the practical miner how some of these countries visited again, seem barren to the explorer.

If for instance now, one were to examine the ravines and vallies of Cuba and of S. Domingo, or even the coast of Veragua, how difficult, without the historical evidence which we possess, would it be to believe the richness of the mines of these very regions at the close of the 15th century!

Under-ground mining, properly so called, of auriferous veins, lasts a much longer time, when no external circumstance disturbs it.

Precisely because we do not know in advance the whole deposite, for the mine discovers itself in proportion as it is worked, a more durable element is offered to human activity.

How few of the forty gold-washing sites, so carefully described by Strabo, can be recognized now!

This observation, founded upon positive analogies and upon the recognized principles of mining, is all the more to be made here, since a vain scepticism triumphs in attempting to shake the traditions of Antiquity.

Burnes: Travels in Bokhara, v. ii. p. 265.

[Herod. iii. 102. Plin. H. N. xi. 36.]

Opp. reliq. ed. Bähr. Ind. cap. iv. p. 248, 271.

The part of Europe known to the Greeks, was in respect to its metallic wealth, as much behind Asia, as later, the whole European Continent was behind the New World.

This last ratio, that is to say, the relative intensity of product in Europe and America, was, at the commencement of the 19th century, when the mines of the Spanish colonies were worked in their greatest activity, for gold as 1:13 and for silver as 1:15. I apprehend even, that such a ratio, at the period of Alexander and of the Ptolemies, would be found, if one had only statistical data upon it, still more unfavorable for Europe, especially in regard to gold.

Greece herself, it is true, together with the at first very productive silver mines of Laurium, had a considerable amount of gold in the mines of Thessaly, in the Pangaean mountains on the frontiers of Macedon and Thrace, and amid the early establishments of the Phenicians opposite to the island of Thrasos.

Iberia, too, was a region of silver for others than the Phenicians and Carthaginians.

Tartessus and Ophir, (this last being either Arabia or the eastern coast of Africa, or even, as Heeren will have it, a generic appellative designating indefinitely the rich countries of the South) were the double object of the united fleets of Solomon and Hiram.

Although amid all the metallic wealth of Spain, the silver of Boetica [Andalusia] and of the district of Carthagena, a city founded by Hamilcar Barca, was for a long while the principal object of foreign commerce; nevertheless, during many a year, Gallicia, Lusitania, and above all, the Asturias, furnished 20000 pounds of gold, that is to say, almost as much as Brazil at the most flourishing epoch of its mines.

There is nothing astonishing, therefore, in the Iberian peninsula, early visited, acquiring with the Phenicians and Carthaginians the reputation of a Western El-dorado.

There is no doubt that in many localities which shew now only faint metallic traces, the original soil formerly was covered quite near the surface with beds of auriferous sand, or sown with the debris of some formerly massive ore containing gold.

The local importance of these mines of southern Europe is incontestable; but in comparison with Asia, their metallic product was small.

This last continent remained for a long time the principal source of the precious metals; and the direction of the current that brought gold into Europe, could only be from East to West.

The elements of this estimate are contained in the 11th chapter of my Essai Politique, &c. [Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain] t. iii. p. 400. [Paris, 1811, 8vo.]

The relative produce of gold was then 1300 kil. and 17300 kil.

[2800 lb. and 38000 lb. avoirdupois, nearly:] and the relative produce of silver was 52700 kil. and 795600 kil.

[equal to 116000 lb. and 1750000 lb. avdp. nearly.]

Otfr.

Müller, History of the Hellenic tribes, t. i. p. 115. Gold-mine near Skapte Hyle (Böckh, Corp. Inscrip. t. i. p. 219.)

On this subject so often treated, see a Memoir of remarkable philological criticism, by Dr. Keil, of Dorpat.

De la Navigation, &c. [On the Voyage to Ophir and Tarshish,] 1834, p. 61, 70.

Böckh, Economie Politique, t. i. p. 15. The port of Carthage even holds a sand of gold thrown in by the Mediterranean, between the river Miliana and cape Sidi- Bou-Said.

The inhabitants, who are poor, turn it to profit at this day.

Dureau de la Malle, Recherches, &c. [Researches into the topography of Carthage,] 1835, p. 251.

Letronne, p. 105, 123.

But Asia itself, that is to say, the report spread by travellers in the middle ages of immense treasures existing in Zipangou, (Japan) and the Southern Archipelago, [Oronesia] produced a sudden change in the direction of this metallic current.

America was discovered, not as has been erroneously said so long, because Columbus foresaw the existence of another continent; but because he was seeking westward a shorter road to Zipangou, so rich in gold, and to the spice countries in southeastern Asia.

Thus the greatest mistake of geography, (that is, the idea of Spain's proximity to India) led to the greatest discovery of geography.

Christopher Columbus and Americus Vespucius both died under the firm conviction of having reached Eastern Asia, (India with the basin of the Ganges, the peninsula of Cattigara;) and hence there can never arise any dispute between them as to the glory of discovering a new continent.

At Cuba, Columbus meant to deliver to the Great Khan of the Mongols, the letters of his sovereign.

He believes himself in Mangi, the southern region of Cathay, (China;) he looks for Quien-sai, the celestial city described by Marco Polo, now Hang-tchen-fou.

"The island of Hispaniola (Hayti)" writes he to Pope Alexander VI.

"is Tarshish, Ophir and Zipangou.

In my second voyage I have discovered 1400 islands and a shore of 333 miles, belonging to the continent of Asia (de la tierra firma de Asia.)" This West-Indian Zipangou produced goldspangles (pepitas de oro) weighing 8, 10, and up to 20 pounds.

Letter of February, 1502, found in the archives of the Duke of Varaguas.

The third voyage, in which the continent of South America was discovered, (on 1 August, 1498, thirteen months after the discovery of North America by Sebastian Cabot) and the fourth voyage which gave the first information as to the western coast of the New world, only confirmed the aged Admiral in his preconceived opinion.

It is not from any confusion of ideas that, in his letter to the pope and his manifest inclination to shew there a certain amount of biblical learning, he represents the names Tarshish, Ophir and Zipangou as synonyms of San Domingo: this belonged, as we see by other writings of Columbus, to his systematic notions.

He considered, not India exactly, but Japan (Zipangou) certainly to be the Ophir of Solomon, which he calls also sometimes Sopora.

He regarded Tarshish, not as the Iberian Tartessus, but with the Septuagint and many theologians of the middle ages, as a common name.

The voyage of Solomon, was not, in his view, a double navigation, having a part in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. It had no other point of departure than Ezimgeber.

Columbus knew Quien-sai from a letter of Toscanelli, and not through Marco Polo, whom he never mentions, though the contrary has been hitherto maintained.

America, from the moment of its discovery, became the principal source of the precious metals.

The new current directed itself from West to East; indeed, it crossed Europe, inasmuch as in the developement of commerce after navigators had doubled Africa, it became necessary to give to southern and eastern Asia a larger equivalent in exchange for spices, silk and pigments.

As before the discovery of the silver mines of Tasco, upon the western slope of the Mexican Cordilleras, (in 1522) America furnished only gold, Isabella of Castile found herself obliged, already in 1497, to modify considerably the legal ratio of the two precious metals.

The monetary edict of Medina, whose date is so remote, and to which up to this time so little importance has been attached, can only be accounted for by this circumstance and by the accumulation of gold at a few points in Europe. I have elsewhere sought to demonstrate how, from 1492 to 1500, the whole quantity of gold drawn from the then discovered portions of the New World, amounted hardly to an annual mean of 2000 marcs, [1000 lb. avoirdupois, nearly.]

Pope Alexander VI.

who thought that he was bestowing one-half of the earth upon the Spaniards, received in return as a present from Ferdinand the Catholic, some little spangles of gold from Hayti "as the first fruits of a country newly discovered," to gild the magnificent dome [the soffit of the dome, (soffitto)] of the basilica of the S.

Maria Maggion.

Mention is made of the metal in an inscription; as being quod primo Catholici reges ex India receperant [what the Catholic Sovereigns had first received from India.]

Memorias de la R. A. &c. [Memoirs of the Royal Academy of History,] t. vi. p. 525. The edict of Medina changed the old legal ratio of 1:10,7.

So great was then the activity of the Spanish Government, that already in 1495, as the historian Mundoz has shown, a miner, Pablo Belvis, was sent to Hayti with provision of quicksilver to facilitate the separation of the gold by amalgamation.

Something very striking in this regard, we read in a passage, recently discovered and but lately published, of the Geography of Scherif Edrisi,* "that the negroes in the interior of Western Africa, as well as the inhabitants of the low and fertile district called Wady el Alaki (between Abyssinia, Bedja and Nubia) work the gold-earth by means of quicksilver."

The Nubian geographer speaks in the middle of the 12th century, of this mode of extraction as a thing known for a long time.

Could this knowledge have been communicated from the East, across Egypt to the country of Blacks, (Chemi)

subtle in decompositions--to Africa?

Antiquity, Greek and Roman, makes mention, it is true, of a very frequent employment of quicksilver to detach the gold from the threads of old lace; but it never speaks of an artistical application of mercury on a large scale in the detailed descriptions of gold-washings it so often gives.

[Continued on p. 601, April No.]

ON THE PRODUCTION OF GOLD AND SILVER AND ITS FLUCTUATIONS. by baron alexander von humboldt.

Translated for the Bankers' Magazine, from the Journal des Economistes, March, April, May, 1848.

[Continued from p. 545, March No.]

It is rather the discovery of new and abundant sources than the disappearance of the old, which has modified the relative value of gold and silver at a given epoch.

It is to this cause, subsequently to the discovery of the greater Antilles, that we must attribute the new rise in the price of gold about the middle of the 16th century; when the rich silver mines of Potosi and Zacatecas had been opened in Peru and in the north of Mexico.

From researches which I have carefully made, it results that the importation of American gold was by weight to that of silver, in the ratio of 1:65; down to the first year of the 18th century, when they commenced the gold workings in Brazil.

At this moment, taking in at one view the aggregate of the metallic commerce of Europe, the ratio is not higher than as 1:47; which is, at least, the result given by comparison of the quantities of the two metals simultaneously existing in Europe in the state of coin.

The data in the work, in other points so excellent, of Adam Smith, are very inexact; in respect to this ratio, they are in error by more than one-half.

In commerce, the relative value of gold and silver among the civilized nations of Europe in immediate intercourse with each other, oscillated during the first hundred years subsequent to the discovery of the new continent, between 1:10,7 and 1:12; and in the two last, continues between 1:14 and 1:16. This fluctuation is very far from depending solely upon the relative quantities of the two metals annually obtained from the bosom of the earth.

The ratio of their values is very soon modified by the cost of mining, by the demand or necessities of consumers, by the greater or less expense of transport, by the application of metals in the manufacture of plate and other metallic articles.

The simultaneous action of so many elements, joined to the facility of transmission amid the so general and so rapid commerce of the world, and to the immense quantity of metals accumulated in Europe, prevents now any partial oscillation in the relative value of gold and silver, from being very considerable or long continued.

Of this, we may be convinced at any sudden interruption in production, as for instance, after the revolution in Spanish America; or even by instances of extraordinary employment of one only of the precious metals in the operations of an active mint.

Thus, during the ten years from 1817 to 1827, there has been coined in England more than 1.294.000 marcs [650.000 lbs. avoirdupois nearly] of gold; and yet this consumption of gold raised the rate of gold and silver in London only from 1:14,97 to 1:15,60.

And still, at the close of 1837, one buys in London a pound of gold for 16,65 pounds of silver.

We shall offer presently the numerical elements for the solution of a problem, in which it is proposed to determine what modifications are to be expected from the gradual and simultaneous action of the recent mines in the Ural and those of North America.

See my Essai Politique t. iii. pp. 400, 436, 448, 463. Jacob, Precious Metals, t. ii. p. 187. The result which I have found, has been illustrated with profound penetration by Say, [Political Econ.] t. ii. ch. 10, by analogies drawn from general commerce.

See the recent excellent work of J. G. Hoffman, entitled Lehre vom Gelde, [Science of the Mint] 1838, p. 7.

The mass of precious metal reaching Europe since the discovery of America up to the Mexican revolution, amounts for gold, to 10.400.000 marcs of Castile, [5.284.686 lbs. avoirdupois] and for silver, to 533.700.000 marcs [271.195.843 lbs. avoirdupois;] and in value together to 5940 millions piastres [say 6000 millions of American dollars.]

The silver taken in this interval from the American soil is here calculated upon the intrinsic value of the piastre, that is to to say, 0,903 fine; so these 533.700.000 marcs of standard silver make only 481.931.100 marcs [i. e. 244.889.846 lbs. avdp.] of pure silver.

This would be equivalent to a sphere of pure silver having a diameter of [90,15 English feet.]

Such a reduction to form and size is as admissible as other analogous figurative valuations.

If, for instance, the product of silver from Spanish America for the whole period of 318 years, be compared with the product of iron from some European States for only a single year, [while we have for the former as before, a sphere of 90 English feet in diameter] we find according to the estimate of M. de Dechen, a distinguished geologist, spheres of pure [malleable] iron for Great Britain of 148 Paris feet, [157,7 English feet] for France 111 feet, [118,3 English] and for the Prussian monarchy 76 feet [81 feet English;] so great is the difference of quantity in these two metals, silver and iron, found in that portion of the earth's crust which man has been able to penetrate.

Such a sphere represents the mass of pure silver which has come from America to Europe in the space of 318 years, from 1492 to 1809.

The marc of Castile is 0,229 killogramme.

[Taking its better attested weight of 3557 grains English, it corresponds more nearly to 0,2305 kilogr. or 0,5081 lb. avdp. which is the factor actually used in the reduction for the text; which has retained] the specific gravity of silver at 10,474.

Of the two analogous valuations in spheres given in the second edition of my Essai Politique, &c. (t. iii. p. 418, 459,) and expressing the mass of silver from 1492 to 1830, both in silver of the piastre-standard and of fine, the first is exact; in the second must be read 26,37 instead of 20,47 metres in diameter.

The estimate for Great Britain is upon the mean product of crude iron during 1828--30. (McCulloh, Dict.

of Commerce, 1834, p. 736.)

This mean is 617.352 tons or 12.149.487 Prussian quintals.

The diameter of a sphere of crude iron, the product of one year, will be consequently 175 Prussian feet, or 169 Paris feet, [180 English feet.]

Crude iron yields, when converted into bars, 5-7 of its weight.

For the production of France has been taken that of the year 1835, (Resume der Travaux Statistique, p. 61) 2.690.636 metrical quintals [of 100 kilog.] equal to 5 227 905 Prussian quintals or 1.345.000 tons English very nearly.

In the States of Prussia, the production of crude iron was for the year 1836, 1.651.598 quintals [or 83.932 tons English.]

While the current of gold and silver was thus directed from West to East, it only passed through Spain.

Very little of it remained with the nation; still less was deposited in the royal treasury.

Ferdinand the Catholic (as the admirer and friend of the great monarch, writes a few days after his death) died so poor that they did not know how to procure the money necessary for the suitable habiliments of the attendants who were to wait upon the funeral procession.

I give this remarkable passage of his letter to the Bishop of Tuy: Madrigalegium villulam Regis tibi alias descripsi.

Tot regnorum dominus totq. palmarum cumulis ornatus, Christianae religionis amplificator et prostrator hostium, Rex in rusticana obiit casa; et pauper contra opinionem hominum obiit.

Vix ad funeris pompam et paucis familiaribus praebendas vestes pullatas pecumae apud eum neque alibi congestae, repertae sunt; quod nemo unquam de vivente judicavit.

[Madrigalejos, the country-seat of the King, I have elsewhere described for you.

Lord of so many realms, wearer of so many laurels, diffuser of the Christian religion, and vanquisher of its enemies, the King died in a rustic cabin; and, contrary to all opinion, died poor.

Hardly money enough for the ceremony of the funeral and furnishing the few domestics with mourning suits, was found either upon him or elsewhere; what no one, while he lived, ever would have thought.]

Ranke, in his dissertation on Spanish finances, has treated of the pecuniary embarrassments of Charles V. The ingenious historian has completed and confirmed by new documents the official vouchers which I have given [elsewhere] of the small quantity of precious metals which the mines of America and the pretended treasures of the Incas yielded.

Petri Mart.

Epist. lib. xxix. No. 556 (xxiii. Jan. 1516.) Nine years later, the gold-washings of Hispaniola were already exhausted.

Sugar and hides are alone mentioned as articles of export.

Tres habemus ab Hispaniola naves (writes again Anghiera) saccareis panibus et coriis boüm onustas.

(Ep. No. 806, Kal. Mart. 1525.)

This passage is important in the history of commerce; since the first sugarcane was planted in S.

Domingo only in 1520 by Pedro Atienza.

Ranke; Fürsten u. Völker, &c. [Princes and People of the South of Europe] t. i. p. 347--355.

Essai Politique, &c. t. iii. pp. 361--482, 421--428.

The working of the mines did not yield 3 million of piastres [dollars] a year, until 1545.

The ransom of Atahualpa amounted, according to Gomara, to 52000 marcs of silver [about 425.000 dollars of our standard] and the booty (the pillage of the temples at Cuzco) according to Herrera, to the value of 25700 marcs, only.

A more exact knowledge of the history of the metallurgic production or of the gradual developement of the great metalliferous beds in the New World, shews us why the lowering of the value of the precious metals, or (what is the same) the rise in price of wheat and other indispensable products of the soil and of human industry, was felt most sensibly only about the middle of the 16th century, and especially from 1570 to 1595.

It was then only that the masses of silver from the mines of Tasco, of Zacatecas and of Pachuca in New Spain, of Potosi, of Porco and of Oruro, in the chain of the Peruvian Andes, begun to be distributed more uniformly over Europe and to affect the price of grain, of wool and of manufactured goods.

The true opening and working of the mines of Potosi by the Spanish conquistadores, dates from the year 1545; and the celebrated sermon of Bishop Latimer before Edward VI., in which he expresses his indignation at the rise in price of all the most necessary articles, dates on 17 January, 1548.

The laws relating to cereal grains, promulgated in England from 1554 to 1688, evince still better, if possible, than the prices of grain which have been collected by Fleetwood, Dupre des Saint Maur, Garnier and Lloyd, the accumulation of specie.

The exportation of coin is, as we know, only allowed there when the price of a certain measure reaches a scale determined by law.

This limit was under Queen Mary, in 1554, 6 shillings a quarter; under Elizabeth, in 1593, about 20 shillings; and in 1604, under James I. more than 26 shillings.

These figures are without doubt of great importance; but their explanation requires special circumspection, inasmuch as the problem of the price of grain, and indeed of prices generally, is highly complicated, and as the legislation of each epoch was under the domain of theoretical opinions very variable, was influenced by the aristocracy, the proprietors of the soil, and was controlled even by the unequal accumulation of money and merchandise at different points.

Besides the changes of temperature, (the mean of the Spring and Summer months) which favour the culture of cereal grains, do not extend at the same time over the whole of agricultural Europe.

Even the improvement in culture, the better employment of the productive forces of the Earth, modifies prices.

Material increase of population and the development of commerce which results from this increase, augment the demand for specie.

Thus, along with the standard which we look for and think to find among the variable prices of grain, we have yet to keep count of two magnitudes which may be simultaneously modifying themselves.

The rise in the prices of cereals does not express, even for any country taken by itself, the proportionate increase in the quantity of gold and silver, any more than it informs us of the general mean temperature, and (according to the theory of a great Astronomer) the number of spots on the Sun.

We are absolutely without synchronizing data to embrace a large part of Europe; and exact researches have shewn that in Upper Italy, for instance, the rise in price of wheat, wine and oil was much less between the 15th and 16th centuries, than might have been reasonably expected from what was known in England, France and Spain, where the prices of cereals rose quadruple and even sextuple.

It is worth while to mention here a numerical result established upon the average prices for a period of fourteen years in the whole Prussian monarchy.

This has been calculated with the greatest care, at my request, by the Director of our Statistical Bureau, Mr. Privy- Councillor Hofmann.

In the year 1838, while we can buy at Berlin, for 1 pound of gold, 15 [Formel] pounds of fine silver, 1611 pounds of copper, and nearly 9700 pounds of iron; the pound of gold is worth, upon the means of the periods 1816-29, and 1824-37, likewise 20794 lb. of wheat, 27655 lb.

of rye, 31717 lb. of barley, and 32626 lb. of oats.

Jacob: On Precious Metals: t. ii. p. 77, 132 and 138.

Gianrinaldo Carli; Opp. t. vii. p, 190. Savigny: Geschichte des Rechts [History of Jurisprudence] t. iii. p. 567. Information upon prices in Southern Europe, goes certainly as far back as the 14th century; for, in 1321, Marino Sanuto presented to Pope John XXII. an estimate of the expenses of a crusade which was to divert all the commerce of the East.

From this estimate, as well as from the prices given by Balducci Pegoletti, the standard of coins is susceptible of being determined much more carefully than it has been yet by those who have occupied themselves with the doctrine of trade and the history of commerce.

Elemencin, in the Mem. of the Roy. Acad. of History; t. vi. p. 553. Wheat (trigo) per fanega [1,6-10 U. S. bushel very nearly] was worth in Spain, from 1406 to 1502, at a mean, 10 reals; from 1793 to 1808, 62 reals, the coin being reduced to the same standard.

This result accords with the researches of Say into the prices of cereals in France (Traite d'Econ. Polit. t. i. p. 352.)

In the days of the Maid of Orleans, under Charles VII. the hectolitre of wheat, (weighing 75 kilog.)

[165 3/8  lb. avdp. nearly = 23/4 bushels by Maryland standard] had fallen as low as 219 grains of silver [267,45 English grains = 72 cents in money of American silver standard.]

The average price a little before the discovery of America was 268 grains [88 cents;] it had risen to 333 grains [$1 10, nearly] in 1514; under Francis I., to 731 grains [$2 40;] under Henry IV., to 1130 grains [$3 72.]

Lavoisier found that from 1610 to 1789, there had been an appreciation in the ratio of 1130 to 1342 grains.

In 1820, a hectolitre cost in France 1610 grains [$5 30;] counting 9216 of these grains in a pound, or 0,489 kil. (See also Letronne: Considerations gener. sur les Monn.

Grecques: p. 118, 123.) Ascending from the middle ages, we find a rise in the price of cereals.

Under Valentinian III., in 446, the hectolitre was worth 344 grains of silver; and in the decline of the Republic, at the time of Cicero, as much as 528 grains.

The results of Durean de la Malle give prices still higher.

(Comptes Rendus, July, 1838, p. 84.)

The basis of this important statement are as follows:

In the Statistical Bureau at Berlin, is registered, monthly, the market-price of the four principal kinds of grain in every port of Prussia; and the average is then taken for each separate province.

From these averages, is then deduced at the end of the year, the mean prices for the whole year; and from a series of these means has been made up the averages for fourteen years in this manner: from among the prices of the following fourteen years is taken out, every time, the two highest and the two lowest, and the ten terms left are then added; the tenth of this aggregate is considered as the mean price of the fourteen years in question.

In this operation, which embraces the time from 1816 to 1837, there results for the Prussian bushel [scheffel = 1,56 U. S. bushel, very nearly] the following prices: viz.

[This table is given here just as it is printed; but there is manifestly an error.

The two last cyphers in the column of thalers should be zeros] The corresponding points for the four cereals are per bushel in Prussian lbs. (of two marcs of Cologne) 85, 80, 69, and 52. The pound of gold is estimated in the silver coin of Prussia at 439 th. 11 sgr. 6,6-13 pf.

The comparison of the two periods, 1816--29, and 1824--37, shews a fall in prices in the Prussian States of 14,2-7 per cent. for wheat; 111/2 per cent. for rye; 12 per cent. for barley; and 11,13-17 for oats;--a diminution which is attributable in great degree to enhanced production and better use of the soil.

(Dieterich; Uebersicht des Verkaufs [View of Commerce] 1838, p. 174.)

I consider this diminution here as entirely independent of the influence or supply of precious metals.

[For greater illustration, the following Table is constructed to shew at the given epochs the relative value of equal weights of the several substances:

Gold being unity; as follows:

metals. cereals.

Gold: 1. Copper: 0,000621 Wheat: 0,000048 Barley: 0,000032 Silver: 0,064103 Iron: 0,000103 Rye: 0,000036 Oats: 0,000028]

The fears which, on the appearance of the work of Jacob (on Precious Metals,) a book of great merit, and which has not received in Germany the attention it deserves, were spreading on account of the diminished import of precious metals from the New Continent, have not been realized.

The metallic production, fallen so low from 1809 to 1826, has nevertheless, in spite of the troubled state of Spanish America, risen afresh to three-fourths of what it was when I left those countries.

In Mexico, according to the most recent intelligence, which I owe to the attention of the Prussian Charge d'Affaires, Mr. de Gerolt, the working has amounted to 20 and even 22 millions of piastres; a result for which, the chief contributions (besides that of Zacatecas) have come from the recently worked mines of Tresnilla, of Chihuahua, and of Sonora.

During the last peaceful epoch of the Spanish domination, I could not estimate the mean yield of the mines of Mexico at more than 23 millions piastres (about 53.700 kil.

[1.184.000 lb. avdp. nearly] of silver, and 1600 kil.

[3500 lb. avdp.] of gold.

The account was then more easily ascertained; for there was but one central mint, and the laws restricted the commerce to a few ports.

In no other place in the world was the activity greater then than in this central mint, which coined in domestic gold and silver, from 1690 to 1803, 1353 million piastres; and from the discovery of New Spain until its Independence, about 2028 million piastres, i. e. two-fifths of all the precious metals which the whole of the New Continent has furnished during the same period to the Old.

It is only this year [1837] that Mr.

Ternaux Campans, in his extremely interesting collection of Original Memoirs of the Discovery of America (Conquest of Mexico, p. 451,) has published an official list of the sums sent between 1522 and 1587 by the Viceroys of New Spain to the mother country.

I did not find this list in the Mexican archives.

It is very remarkable, and shews that my former estimates of the metallic yield of Mexico, (Essai Polit. t. iii. p. 414) were yet a little too high.

A contrary opinion has been of late frequently expressed.

From the administration of Fernando Cortez up to the year 1552, when the mines of Zacatecas were just opened, the export rarely amounted in a year to 100000 peros [or piastres, dollars very nearly.]

From this epoch, it took a rapid rise.

In the years 1569, 1578, and 1587, it was already respectively 931.564, 1.111.202, and 1.812.051 peros of gold.

These sums are calculated, not upon the piastres, but upon these peros of gold, [they must be multiplied at a mean by 111/4 in order to represent the value in dollars.]

See the instructive work of Mr.

Joseph Burkhardt: Aufenthalt u.

Reisen in Mexico, &c. [Residence and Travel in Mexico from 1824 to 1834] 1st Part: p. 360, 385. Second Pt.: p. 74, 152.

Thaler.

Silbergroschen.

Pfennig.

Wheat, 1. 23. 10,5-9 Rye, 1. 8. 1,5-9 Barley, 1. 28. 8,1-9 Oats, 1. 21. 8,1-3

The allegations, then, growing out of the disappointments in fruitless undertakings, as to the exhaustion of the mineral wealth of Mexico, is in contradiction with the geognostic facts of the country, and even with the most recent experience.

The Zacatecas mint alone, during the troubled period from 1811 to 1838, has struck more than 66.332.000 piastres from 7.758.000 marcs of silver; and in eleven latter years (from 1822 to 1833) has yielded uninterruptedly from 4 to 5 million piastres; viz:

1829: 4.505.103 piastres.

1830: 5.189.902 " 1831: 4.469.450 " 1832: 5.012.000 " 1833: 5.720.000 piastres.

ON THE PRODUCTION OF GOLD AND SILVER AND ITS FLUCTUATIONS. by baron alexander von humboldt.

Translated for the Bankers' Magazine, from the Journal des Economistes, March, April, May, 1848.

[Continued from p. 595, April No.]

At Zacatecas, a single vein, la Veta Grande, which has been worked since the 16th century, and which up to 1738 furnished often in one year as much as 3 million piastres, has put in circulation the masses of metal, as below:

1828: 117.268 marcs of silver [=59.572 lb. avdp. 1829: 235.741 " " 119.706 " 1830: 279.288 " " 141.878 " 1831: 272.095 " " 138.224 " 1832: 258.498 " " 131.317 " 1833: 209.192 " " 106.270 lb. avdp.]

Guanaxuato which, it is true, used to furnish even in my time as much as 755.000 marcs of silver [383.500 lbs. avdp.] a year, has on the other hand fallen latterly to less than the half of this yield.

Thus it gave in

gold. silver.

1829, 852 marcs [433 lb. avdp. 269.494 marcs [136.903 lb. avdp. 1830, 1058 " 537 " 284.386 " 144.468 " 1831, 622 " 316 " 258.500 " 131.318 " 1832, 1451 " 737 " 300.612 " 152.711 " 1833, 1144 " 581 lb. avdp.] 316.024 " 160.540 lb. avdp.]

Whenever these superb countries, favored by nature in so many regards, shall come, after a long fermentation and profound internal agitations, to enjoy peace--new metallic deposites must necessarily be opened and developed in the cultivation of the soil.

In what region of the globe, outside of America, can be cited examples of wealth in silver so abundant?

Let it not be forgotten that near Sombrereta, where some mines were opened as far back as 1555, the family of Fagoaga (Marquesses of Apartado) have derived, in the short space of five months, from a front of 16 toises [102 feet English] in the outcrop of a silver mine, a net profit of 4 million piastres; and that in the mining district of Catorca in the space of two years and a half (1781- 1783) in ground full of mines of chloride of silver and of colorados, which the common people call the purse of God (la bolsa de Dios padre) an ecclesiastic, Juan Flores, made likewise a gain of 31/2 million piastres.

The production of gold in Spanish and Portuguese America has diminished in much greater proportion than that of silver; but such diminution dates from an epoch long anterior to the political troubles of the tropical regions.

I have already adverted in another place to the error existing till the beginning of this century as to the duration of the richness of the Brazilian washings, and how the flourishing state of these workings (from 1752 to 1773) has been confounded with its subsequent condition.

The report of the Bullion-Committee, so important for the history of commerce, began to throw some light on this subject.

I am indebted for the most authentic information to the private communications of the former Director-General of Mines, Baron von Eschwege.

Jacob's work upon precious metals contains only additions of little moment.

From 1752 to 1761, the gold-workings of Minas Geraes, upon the returns of the fifth part for royalty, oscillated between 6400 and 8600 kilogrammes [14.000 and 19.000 lbs. avdp.] (The Portuguese arroba is equal according to Franzini to 14,656 kil.)

[Balbi says 14,686 1/3  kil. = 32,378 lbs. avdp.] This yield is certainly very considerable and much above that of the Ural and Altai, [until 1838; when the yield from the Russian districts equalled the higher of the Brazilian numbers;] but we must remember that in 1804, Spanish America gave likewise nearly 10.400 kilog. of gold, as under:

Essai Polit. t. iii. pp. 448 - 452.

Report of the Bullion-Committee of 1810.

Append, 17-22.

Vol. ii pp. 266 and 295.

New Granada, ........ 4700 kil. [10.340 lb. avdp.

Chili, ...........

2800 " 6.160 "

Mexico, ..........

1600 " 3.520 "

Peru, ........... 780 " 1.716 "

Buenos Ayres, ........ 500 " 1.100 "

10.380 kil.

= 22.836 lb. avdp.]

The yield of the Minas Geraes had already fallen, at a mean among the years

1785-1794, to 3300 kil.

[7260 lb. avdp.

1810-1817, 1600 " 3520 "

1818-1820, 428 " 932 lb. avdp.]

The assertion of Chev.

Schaeffer, that in 1822 only 24 arrobas [775 lbs. avdp.] went to the smelting furnace of Villa Rica agrees with the result given before.

Since this period, the working of the Brazilian gold mines seems to have been a little stimulated by the industry of some English companies; but what has contributed more than the exhaustion of the mineral deposites to the decline of the gold washings, is the inclination to the culture of colonial products favored by the trade in slaves which always is kept up.

Unauthorized commerce is so extensive in Brazil that it is much to be wished that some citizen there, thoroughly acquainted with the situation of the country, would charge himself with the task of elucidating the general relations of the annual production of gold since 1822.

It is a fact worthy of remark in the history of mining by Europeans, that since the gold-workings in Brazil have fallen so low, the product of this metal should have risen to an unexpected height in northern Asia and in the southern portions of the United States;--in this last country, it is true, but transiently.

The chain of the Ural prolonging itself under the same meridian, like a wall, from Oust-ourt in the northern part of the isthmus of Truchmena up to the lcy Sea, and even according to the excellent observations of the botanist, Alexander Schrenk, and of Baer, to the islands of Waigatz and to Nova Zembla, yields gold in an extent of more than 17 degrees of latitude.

Though in 1821 and 1822, the Ural furnished only 27 or 28 poods [973,8 lb. to 1009,9 lb. avdp.] the ratio of its auriferous sands rose in the three following years, 1823-4 and 5 successively to 105, 266 and 237 poods [3787 lb., 9594 lb. and 8548 lb. avdp., respectively.]

According to a table of the precious metals mined in the Russian Empire and obtained pure at the mint of Saint Petersburg, a table which has been sent to me in MS.

by Count Cancrin, Minister of Finance of Russia, the production of gold was in

1828, 290 poods 39 pounds [10.494,77 lb. avdp.

1829, 289 " 25 " 10.446,08 "

1830, 347 " 27 " 12.539,80 "

1831, 352 " 2 " 12.697,59 "

1832, 380 " 31 " 13.709,29 "

1833, 368 " 27 " 13.297,23 "

1834, 363 " 10 " 13.101,56 lb. avdp.]

[These quantities differ from what has been more recently officially published; and the following more complete table is therefore annexed.

Tooke: History of Prices, p. 451, ed. 1848.

The discovery of gold in the Ural dates back to 1819: the auriferous sands of Siberia were not developed until 1829.

Since then the yield has been

1819, 40 poods 9 pounds 55 zolotnics : 1451,34 lb. avdp.

1820, 44 " 3 " - " : 1589,68 "

1821, 52 " 4 " 65 " : 1879,73 "

1822, 79 " 21 " 36 " : 2865,61 "

1823, 125 " 19 " 79 " : 4526,32 "

1824, 228 " 13 " 38 " : 8235,49 "

1825, 257 poods 12 pounds 54 zolotnic : 9280,70 lb. avdp.

1826, 257 " 25 " 15 " : 9292,90 "

1827, 307 " 30 " 95 " : 11100,70 "

1828, 317 " 39 " 44 " : 11469,01 "

Epoch in Siberia: 1829, 314 " 31 " 1 " : 11353,19 "

1830, 378 " 15 " 79 " : 13648,71 "

1831, 396 " 29 " 37 " : 14309,28 "

1832, 410 " 8 " 61 " : 14795,50 "

1833, 408 " 22 " 71 " : 14736,08 "

1834, 406 " 4 " 64 " : 14647,68 "

1835, 413 " 1 " 8 " : 14896,90 "

1836, 426 " 3 " 74 " : 15368,21 "

1837, 469 " 20 " 75 " : 16934,45 "

1838, 524 " 36 " 69 " : 18932,52 "

1839, 525 " 6 " 38 " : 18941,27 "

1840, 585 " 15 " 60 " : 21114,54 "

1841, 681 " 20 " 34 " : 24580,39 "

1842, 950 " 26 " 68 " : 34288,30 "

1843, 1283 " 2 " 60 " : 46277,09 "

1844, 1341 " 25 " 60 " : 48389,75 "

1845, 1386 " 6 " 41 " : 49995,50 "

1846, 1722 " 29 " 87 " : 62135,38 "

14335 " 28 " 45 " : 517054,72 "

The Russian pood is divided into 40 pounds; and the pound into 96 zolotnics.

In the reduction, the pound is rated at 0,90169 lb. avdp. The aggregate amount is what is given in the authority quoted from.

It will be seen from the table that the yield of the year 1846 is more than the aggregate of the 10 years preceding the Siberian epoch.

Taking the value of our gold coin as the index, fine gold is worth per lb. avdp. 301,46 dollars; which may be called in round numbers 300 dollars per lb.: and the yield of 1846 was worth 18.640.614 dollars.

The average yield of the whole 28 years is 18.466,24 lb. or 5.539.872 dollars.]

When, by order of the Emperor Nicholas, I made with my friends, Gustavus Rose and Ehrenberg, my expedition to Northern Asia, the extraction of gold by washing was restricted to that portion of the Ural which serves as the boundary of Europe.

The Altai (in Mongol, the gold-mountains, Altaiin-Oola) furnished only a small quantity (about 1900 marcs, say 950 lb. avdp.) which was extractible from the silver ores (containing also gold) of the rich mines of Schlangenberg or Smeinogorsk, of Ridderski and of Syrianowski.

But since 1844, this has been amply compensated for in Siberia.

Beds of auriferous sand have been discovered entirely resembling those on the slopes of the Ural.

The House of Popof, whose influence has been so beneficial to the commerce of the interior of Asia, has given here also a praiseworthy example.

Of 398 poods of gold which the whole Russian Empire furnished in 1836, 293 p. 26 pds. came from the Ural and 104 p. 15 pds. from the Altai. [i. e. 75 and 25 per centum respectively.]

In the year following, 1837, the workings in Eastern Siberia had become so extended that the Altai gave 130 poods of washed gold; and the Ural (both from the Imperial and private mines) 309 poods.

If to these be added 30 poods, extracted from the friable strata of the Altai and of Nertschinsk, we have for the whole production of gold in Russia for 1837 an exact result of 469 poods.

[This quantity is almost exactly he same with what is given in the preceding table.

It may be added that of the whole aggregate of that table, there was furnished from the

Altaiin is a genitive form of the Mongol tongue.

Klaproth, Memoires, [Asiatic Memoirs] vol. ii. p. 382.

Besides, in platinum from the Ural, 118 p. 2 pds. or 8269 marcs of Cologne.

Ural Imperial mines, .... 2926 P. 24 p. 32 z. = 105.555,74 lb. avdp.

" Private mines, .... 4299 39 70 152.205,03 "

Siberian Imperial mines, ... 1293 7 28 46.641,98 "

" Private mines, ... 5895 37 11 212.651,96 "

14335 2845 = 517.054,71 lb. avdp.

The proportion therefore of the Ural to the Siberian yield is as 257.760,77 lb. to 259.293,94 lb., which is a ratio of equality very nearly; and the productiveness of the Imperial mines to the private ones has been as 152.197,72 lb. to 364.856,99 lb., or nearly as 2 to 5. The whole of the gold from the Russian mines since 1819 to 1846, inclusive, is equivalent to a sphere of 9,36 feet in diameter.]

It is only very recently that we have had information upon the extraction, properly so called, of the beds of auriferous sand by a very distinguished geologist, my former comrade in the Southern Ural. Mr. Helmersen.

The gold washed out for some years and in constantly increasing quantity in the Eastern part of the government of Tomsk does not belong to the great mass of mountain which we call the principal chain of the Altai which Ledebour, Bunge and Gebler have visited; and in which Mount Beloucha with its snowy peaks rises above the sources of the Catouinia to a height of 11.000 feet, the level of the Wetterhorn and of the Peak of Teneriffe.

The beds of sand mixed with gold shew themselves upon the two slopes; but more especially upon the eastern exposure of a little spur which the Altai (whose direction is east and west) throws out to the north under the meridian of the lake of Telesk, and which is prolonged up to the parallel of Tomsk.

My friend, Mr. Helmersen, says: "Upon the maps, this spur which contains gold capable of being washed out, is designated by the names of the Abassanki, the Kusnezki and the Alatan Mountains.

In respect to direction, structure and form, it has the most entire similarity with the Ural; it is, in fact, a repetition of the Ural upon a smaller scale.

The analogy even holds that there also the eastern slope is rich in gold while the western is much less so.

As it happens that this western slope is the side reserved for the crown, up to this time private undertakers only have realized a profit from the workings of the Alatan, the northern spur of the Altai."

Geologists, familiar with my researches upon the direction of the mountain-systems of inner Asia, and with the ingenious ideas of Elie de Beaumont upon the parallelism and the relative succession in age of the spurs and chains of mountains, cannot fail to recognize the importance of Mr. Helmersen's observations.

I have not myself seen the northern deposites of the auriferous sand of the Altai (of the Kusnezki) because my journey was from Tobolsk, by Tara and across the steppe of Barabinski, towards the western and southern Altai; and thence towards the boundary point of China, Chounimailekhou, in the province of Ili north of the Lake Saisan.

This has been called, very improperly, the little Altai. Mr. Helmersen partakes of my incredulity as to the existence of the great Altai (Asiatic Fragments; vol. i. p. 28.)

He says: "one of those wide and long vallies traversing the central chain of the Altai, is the valley of the upper Buchtarma: it separates the northern portion, belonging to Russia, from the southern belonging to China.

This southern part has been frequently and even very recently designated as the Great Altai, as distinguished from the northern, called the Little Altai.

Apart from the impropriety of these denominations, which do not appear founded in nature, and which are not accepted by the inhabitants of those regions, they only serve to perpetuate the error which one map-maker hands over to another.

The Chinese and the Russian Altai make only one and the same whole; and there is no motive for considering them as two mountain chains different even in their direction."

Helmersen, in the Bulletin of the Academy of S. Petersburg; vol. ii. p. 107. See also Erman; Reise, [Journey round the World] vol. ii. p. 19 - 21.

The auriferous sand of the Altai is a little richer in silver than that of the Ural.

Siberian establishments, strongly encouraged by the Imperial administration of the Mines, have even set up washing-concerns, [lavoirs,] for winter time; and the results of this new branch of industry are the more remarkable and satisfactory since the workmen are only voluntary and are well paid.

According to very recent information which I owe to the Minister of Finance, Count Cancrin, there have been just discovered rich beds of sand both in the chain of Salairski and along the river Biriousa which separate the governments of Jeniseisk and Irkoutsk.

For the whole of Siberia, there have been already distributed 240 licenses to work the auriferous beds.

The village of Biriussinsk, upon the road from Kansk to Nijnei-Udinsk, occupies a very picturesque position between two very deep glens; even on the eastern side, the ground is very much broken up to the sandstone escarpments of Nijnei- Udinsk.

(Erman, Handschriftliche Nachr.

[Epistolary Correspondence.])

Such is the importance attributable in these later times to the current of gold from the East to the West; the changes in which current, it has been the principal object of these researches to indicate.

The 469 poods [16.934 lb. avdp.] of gold from the Ural and the Altai, the yield of the year of 1837 are worth in Prussian money 7.211.000 thalers [say 5.080.000 dollars.]

This amount is only the one-eighth less than the product of the Minas Geraes in Brazil during the most favorable years of the brilliant period from 1752 to 1761; but it is almost one-third less than the precise product of New Granada, Chili and Mexico a short time before the commencement of the Revolution in Spanish America.

When we consider the immense extent of the Siberian Continent and advert, too, to the rapid increase of the Ural mines during 1822, 1823 and 1824, we have ground for believing that the afflux of gold from Siberia, from the East to the West, from Asia to Europe has not attained its maximum. [We have the more ground for such anticipation when we see that the actual yield of the ninth year afterwards has nearly quadrupled that of 1837: and that the 20.000.000 dollars of 1846 almost equals the product of both gold and silver of Mexico in her palmiest state.]

The yield of Eastern Siberia will augment perhaps more rapidly than the decrease of the lavoirs of the Ural; where have been worked at first and unfortunately in too hasty a manner, the richest beds of sand.

In the hydrostatic methods used, there is undoubtedly wasted a large quantity of precious metal, attached as it is to grains of oxide of iron and other light substances.

This is not the place to discuss if the ingenious mode proposed by Colonel Anossow, the intendant at Slatoust, which promises such excellent results and which consists in fusing the mineral with iron and treating the mass with sulphuric acid--is susceptible of employment on a large scale under all the circumstances of the size of the fused masses, the labor in transporting sand containing such a small per centage of gold, and the great quantity of fuel which would be required.

Trials, long and welldirected, seem hitherto to pronounce against the practicability of this method.

The notions, which have been obtained in the last fifteen years, of the gold-riches still waiting to be derived from Northern Asia, make one involuntarily think of the Issedonians, the Arimaspians and those griffins, guardians of immense treasures, which Aristaeus of Proconnesus and, two hundred years after him, Herodotus, have made so famous.

I have had the good fortune to visit, in the Southern Ural, localities where, a few inches below the surface, have been discovered, near together, brilliant masses of gold of 13, of 15, and even of 24 Russian pounds: [11.7 lb., 13.5 lb. and 21.6 lb. avdp. respectively.]

It may be that masses much larger have been found formerly in the shape of rounded lumps and lying exposed on the surface.

There would be nothing astonishing, then, if from the most remote antiquity, this gold has been gathered by a hunting and pastoral people,--if the report of riches so considerable, echoed afar and spread from the shores of the Euxine Sea to the Hellenic colonies who very soon had relations with the North-east of Asia beyond the Caspian Sea and Lake Aral.

In the Fragments of Alcman which Mr.

Welcker has commented on, as well as in those of Hecataeus and of Damastes, there is alike mention made of the Issedones.

(Hec. Milet. Fragm. ed. Klausen. n. 168, p. 92.)

The largest lump of gold found as yet in the Ural (at Alexandrowsk, near Miask) is 8 inches long by 5 3/8  wide and 43/4 thick.

It weighs 24 pounds 69 zolotnic Russian [22.29 lb. avdp.] and is preserved at S. Petersburg in the magnificent collection of minerals of the Mining Corps.

Among the lumps of platina of Nischne- Tagilsk (the property of Demidoff) have been found three weighing 13, 19 and 20 pounds Russian, respectively.

Rose: Reise nach dem Ural, vol. i. p. 41.

The merchant Greeks and even the Scythians did not themselves penetrate as far as to the Issedonians; they trafficked only with the Argippoeans.

Niebuhr, in his researches upon the Scythians and the Getians (researches that have failed of confirmation from what we know at the present day of the difference of races and the affinities of languages among the people of Northern Asia) places the Issedonians and the Arimaspians to the north of Orenburg and therefore just in that gold region now so well known, lying on the eastern slope of the Southern Ural.

This opinion is supported in the solid work (quite recently published) by the Counsellor of State, Eichwald, under the title: Ancient Geography of the Caspian Sea.

Heeren and Völker place the gold-region of Herodotus in the Altai; and, I confess, this opinion seems to me the more justified by the configuration of the localities.

Herodotus describes a commercial route by which the gold of the Northern Altai (or rather as I suppose the repute of this gold) might reach the Euxine by the intermediary Issedonians and Scythians. To penetrate to the Argippaeans with their bald heads, flat noses and large chins, the Scythians and the Greeks of the Pontic colonies had to have recourse in their commerce to seven interpreters of as many different languages.

Klein historiche und philologische Schriften; p. 361. (See also the Herodotische Welt-tafel of Niebuhr.)

Eichwald, like Reichard, derives the name Issedonian from the river Isset; and regards this people as a tribe of the Vogul.

Heeren: Ideen über Politik und Verkehr; vol. i. sec. 2, p. 281--287, ed. 1824.

Völker: Mythische Geographie der Griechen und Römer; vol. i. p. 188 and 191, and the commentary on this work by Klausen in the Scheuzeitung for 1832, p. 653. Völker has collected with the greatest care the passages from the ancient authors, which I do not specially cite here.

These Argippaeans lived on the fruit of the arbor Ponticus whose juice was called aschy; the mass of which after having been strained is kneaded into cakes or balls.

[Herod. Melpom. c. 23.]

Nemnich and Heeren have already thought to find in this the Prunus padus (vol. i. sec. 2, p. 385.)

See also Erman:

Reise um die Erde; vol. i. p. 307.

Herodotus: iv. 24.

Since the discovery of such rich deposites of auriferous sand in the spur which the Altai throws out to the North as far as the parallel of Tomsk, the opinion of the Arimaspians having inhabited a country east of the Ural and very far from this mountain-chain, gains certainly probability.

In the conjecture of a learned and acute traveller, Adolph Erman, the myth of the griffins attaches to the fossil remains of the antediluvian pachyderms so frequently occurring in Northern Siberia, and in which the hunters believe they see the talons and head of a gigantic bird.

If, concludes Mr. Erman, we will agree to see in this ancient tradition the prototype of the Greek myth, we have entire foundation for saying that the miners took the gold from the bosom of the griffins; for nothing is more common at this day, as formerly, than to meet with auriferous sand in strata containing fossils of the kind.

However plausible this explication, there is one fact against it, viz. the mention of these fabulous creatures, the griffins, in the poems of Hesiod where under the form of monsters half lion, half eagle, they adorn the gates of Persepolis; and that they early reached Greece by way of Miletus.

C. O. Muller: Dorier [the Dorians] vol. ii. p. 276. Upon the Griffin of Ctesias, as a Bactro-Indian animal, see Heeren n. s. vol. i. sec. i. p. 239; and Böttiger: Griech. Vasengemälde; vol. i. n. 3, p. 105. Herodotus also (iv. 79. 152) speaks twice of griffins as images and ornaments.

A celebrated Russian academician, Mr. Gräfe, is inclined to regard a monster with enormous teeth--the odontotyrannus spoken of by the Byzantine Historians and by Julius Valerius whose works have been discovered by Mai--as a vague reminiscence of the Siberian mammoth, as a distant echo from the primeval world.

This tyrannus, however, as well as the ancient myth of the griffins does not seem to me to have risen from the icy bosom of these northern alluvial lands; they appear to me rather the imaginative creatures of a southern zone and a warmer clime.

[Cedrenus: Collect. Byzant. T. ix. p. 153. Glycas: ib. T. xi. p. 142--143.]

Gräfe: in the Mem.

of the Acad.

of S. Petersburg; 1830, p. 71 and 74. Julius Valerius in the Res Gestae Alexandri etc. [Milan 1817] lib. iii. c. 33. See besides the Chronique Hamartol; which Hase has obtained in the MS. of the Paris Library.

I mentioned just now that they find in the Ural enormous masses of gold some inches below the surface.

Little water-drains, or a good many other operations equally insignificant, may have by degrees bared those masses until they appear some day at the very surface itself.

Can we see aught but a myth in the story of the sacred gold of the Scythians which Herodotus tells, and in that of the agricultural implements of gold which fell from Heaven and which the two princes, the sons of the king [Targitaus] who first approached could not touch without being burnt, while the youngest, Colaxais, bore unharmed the cooling metal home? or is it rather a remote memory of a fall of aeroliths in a state of ignition?

Iron and gold, are they here taken for one another; and was the sacred gold but a meteoric stone, like the mass found by Pallas, out of which implements of labor could be forged, just as the Esquimaux of Baffin's Bay make yet to this day their knives from aeroliths half buried in the snow?

I know that physical explanations of ancient myths and of modern miracles are not in favor now, and that I run the risk of straying into the errors of the Alexandrian grammarians: but it is pardonable for a naturalist to suggest the fall of bolids.

Perhaps the heavenly metal only burned to drive off the elder brothers?

Even according to the popular belief in Germany, the place of buried treasures always bakes and burns.

But considerations like these take us off from researches purely physical.

[Herodotus: Melpom. c. 5. Mr. Humboldt has here given at length the whole chapter in the Latin of Schweighaüser. It is a perplexed passage in the original; but as the undoubted substance is retained above in the text, I have thought it allowable to be omitted.]

The Massagetians, a tribe of Alans according to Ammianus Marcellinus, used for the furniture of their horses gold as other people do iron.

Herod.

Clio, c. 215. [See also Judges viii. 26, for the mention of the golden chains for the camels; which the Ishmaelitish Midianites yielded to Jerubbaal.]

These beds of auriferous sand in Northern Asia on this side the Obi, this amount of 130 poods [4688.77 lb. avdp.] the yield of one year [1837] in the Altai or Kusnezki, is an event in the history of the commerce of gold; and an event the more important, since it happens in that part of Asia which is under the immediate domination of Europe, and since the product of the workings, flowing towards the West, exercises its influence altogether upon the commerce of Europe.

However ancient may be in Asia the workings of the mineral (so to speak) in place--known under the vague denomination of Tchoudic veins, the existence of considerable masses of manufactured gold found at the earliest occupation of the country in the sepulchres and of which such remarkable specimens exist in the collections of S. Petersburg, is explained more perfectly by the discovery at remote epochs of lumps of gold in the alluvium immediately below the surface of the ground.

Müller, the excellent historian of Siberia, says that the first discoveries of gold in the sepulchres (kourganoui) lowered in a most surprising manner the value of this metal at Krasnojarsk.

Internal Asia, confined between the chain of the Himalaya and the volcanic range called the Celestial Mountains [Thian-chan] forms like China a close realm, as well in a political as (almost in the same degree) in a commercial point of view.

However uncertain may be our notions as to this part of the globe, nevertheless from the brilliant epoch of the Mongol Dynasties to the end of the 13th century, since the travels of the Venetian Polo, the fame of these beds of auriferous sand in the interior of Asia has been penetrating to Europe--on the south by the way of India, on the north, through Siberia.

What are called Tchoudic veins and the Tchoudic mines of North Asia do not belong to the same stock.

The name of this Cabirian race who hunted the mineral and forged the metal, originally signified only foreigners, not Russians [outside barbarians;] but in a more emphatic manner among the Russian annals, according to Klaproth (Asia Polyglotta, p. 184) and the more recent and learned researches of Siogren (Mem. of the Acad.

of S. Petersburg; vi. series, vol. i. p. 308) it covers all the Finnish and the Uralian tribes.

Journal Asiatique, t. ii. p. 12.

The Calcutta journals report that in all Western Thibet, the streams bring down gold; and that the natives extract the metal by amalgamation.

Ancient Indian myths make the sovereign of the North, Kouwera, to be the god of riches; and it is remarkable that the residence of this god (Alaka) is not upon the range of the Himalaya itself, but on the Kailasa on this side of the Himalaya, in Thibet. It is more to the north-west, on this side of the chain of Kouen-loun which separates the districts of Ladakh and Khotan, that Heeren places, with much probability in my opinion, the great Sandy Desert so rich in gold which the Indians bordering on Caspatyrus visited and where ants, smaller than dogs but larger than foxes, burrowed for their nests.

The Bolor, whose eastern slope leads to Khoufaloun (a region which the geographers designate under the name of Little Thibet or Kaschgar,) and to the Lake Lop among the steppes, offered also on its western slope to the distinguished traveller who has last explored this terra incognita, Alexander Burnes, the auriferous beds of Durrvaz and of the upper waters of the Oxus, which he has described.

In China the extraction of gold by washing, dates from the highest antiquity; and we can distinguish in the metallurgic nomenclature of this pedantic people the fields of gold (beds of gold-ore of vast extent in the plains) and lumps of gold under the name of dog-heads, of wheat-grains, and of millet-seed.

Unfortunately in Choco, in Sonora and in the Ural, as every where, there are fewer dog-heads than millet-seed.

Albert Höfer: Translation of the Urwasi and the Kalidasa; 1837, p. 90.

Herod. iii. 102--106.

Heeren: 1st part, 2d sect. p. 90, 102, 340--345.

Compare Ritter: Asia, vol. ii. 657--660.

Burnes: Travels, vol. ii. p. 165.

In 1831, they still found in the Oxus lumps of gold as large as a pigeon's-egg.

Like the Rhine, the Oxus (Djihoun) rolls its sands of gold down to its mouth; and the unfortunate expedition of Prince Alexander Bekewitsch, undertaken for Peter the Great in 1716, was induced by exaggerated and untruthful statements as to the accumulation of gold near the ancient embouchure of the Oxus, south of the little chain of the Balkan and near the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea.

Landresse: upon the Auriferous Alluvion of China, in the Asiatic Journal, vol. ii. p. 90.