GOLD 67 



with but few other substances that man produces. If you are a 

 farmer, and produce wheat, cotton, tobacco or any other of the ordi- 

 nary farm products, you know very well by experience that when the 

 harvest season comes around again the crop that you sold last year 

 will practically have disappeared, and there will be room in the markets 

 for the new one you have for sale. Your wheat will have been eaten 

 up, your cotton woven into clothing and your tobacco disposed of in 

 the form of smoke. If you are a producer of food animals, or a fisher- 

 man, the same will have happened. If you are a lumberman your 

 boards will have been put into buildings or furniture, which in due 

 time must be renewed. If you are a coal miner your crop is trans- 

 formed by the consumer into gas and smoke about as fast as you dig 

 it from the earth. If you are an iron, copper, lead or zinc miner 

 your commodity begins to deteriorate in value the instant it goes into 

 usage, and in five, ten, twenty or fifty years at the utmost the articles 

 into which the bulk of these metals are worked up will have rusted or 

 worn out and must be replaced. 



But not so with gold. The coin you hold in your hand to-day may, 

 for all you know, have been part of the gilding of the dome of King 

 Solomon's temple, in Jerusalem. The case of the watch in your pocket 

 was perhaps taken from the mines of Spain by the early Romans, a 

 thousand years before our era. The ring you give your betrothed may 

 be wrought from a lump of metal washed by the prehistoric miner 

 from the stream beds of Rhodesia or India. 



Who can tell? For gold can not be eaten or burned up. It can 

 only be lost, and the whole world is interested in preventing that fate, 

 and in taking the greatest of precautions against its diminution by 

 wear. Hence gold is what may be called a cumulative crop. The 

 quantity in the hands of man would continually increase, if the crop 

 were a regular one and loss could be prevented. To a certain extent 

 the same is true of silver, but there are no other manufactured sub- 

 stances, except these two metals and the gem stones, that do not 

 steadily and even rapidly deteriorate or disappear. Even gold is some- 

 what subject to the law of decay, for that part of the annual crop that 

 is used in dentistry, in photography and in gilding is rarely employed 

 again for any other purpose, and in a generation or two has gone back 

 to earth. 



How then about the annual crop of gold? Whence does it come, 

 what does it amount to, and how long can we go on extracting it from 

 the bowels of the earth without disturbing the qualities that it seems 

 to have in the commercial and industrial world? These are inter- 

 esting questions that can only be answered by looking backward into 

 the history of the metal, as well as considering its position at the 

 present day. 



