INCREASE IN PRODUCTION OF GOLD. 639 



increase during the next five years in anything like the ratio of the 

 past five years, it may be that a new economic problem, the very- 

 antithesis of that alluded to in the commencement of this paper, may 

 present itself for solution. At all events, the cry of the Populists and 

 others that increasing scarcity of gold is the cause of much of the pov- 

 erty and of other ills of mankind, must surely be drowned in the 

 golden stream now flowing from all quarters of the globe, almost 

 threatening to become a rushing torrent, dangerous to the stable foun- 

 dations of the world's commerce. That this, however, fortunately is 

 an imaginary danger will appear from the following arguments : 



Modern gold-getting by scientific methods compels the permanent 

 investment of an enormous amount of capital, and a moderate return 

 only in dividend is looked for as a rule; thus the balance between 

 acquisition and disbursement is likely to be maintained in the future. 



One of the chief causes of the extraordinary increase of production 

 in very recent years is to be found in the application of the " cyanide 

 process " to the recovery of gold from " tailings." This process is 

 also largely applied to obtaining gold from very low-grade ores, that, 

 in some cases, contain an average of less than one quarter of an ounce 

 of gold distributed throughout a ton of ore! At the present time 

 there are about twenty-five cyanide plants in this country, and over 

 forty in the Transvaal, where the process has received its greatest de- 

 velopment. 



Although the fact that cyanide of potassium would dissolve gold 

 quite readily was known long ago, having been employed by Faraday 

 in his experiments with thin films of transparent gold, and used very 

 extensively in the making of solutions of gold for electroplating baths 

 during fifty years past, the practical application of the solvent to ob- 

 taining gold from low-grade ores is less than ten years old. 



In Utah there is a dry bed of an ancient lake, the floor of which 

 may be said to be carpeted with gold; according to a recent report this 

 bed of limestone, eight miles by ten, varying from twenty to forty feet 

 in thickness, and containing gold in proportion running from six to 

 twenty dollars per ton, is an " ideal ore " for treatment by the cyanide 

 process. A number of cyanide mills are now working the deposit, all 

 paying dividends, and it is said that the only limit to output is the 

 capacity of the mills. It is estimated that there are " 5,000,000,000 

 tons of ore in the district, containing $50,000,000,000 worth of 

 gold ! " Although this statement is startling, the estimate is not a wild 

 guess, for the blanket of ore has been cut in many places; hundreds 

 of samples have been taken from different depths, and in all cases the 

 finely distributed gold has been found, apparently having been de- 

 posited from solution in a mineral water which formed the lake in pre- 

 historic times. 



