100 Analyses of Ancient Alloys. 



penetrating it foi* a short distance, the miners seem to have lost 

 patience and abandoned the works. The pits or shafts are well made, 

 about seven feet in diameter, and of a circular form, some of them 

 being 20 fathoms in depth. The passages and props are also well 

 executed, but the former so low and narrow, that they could only 

 have been excavated with the greatest difficulty to the workmen. 

 The ores when extracted were carried to the nearest rivulet for the 

 purpose of being crushed and washed, which operations were pro- 

 bably dispensed with in the richest varieties, which were sometimes 

 melted in the mines themselves, metallic copper, together with slag, 

 and the tools employed in melting and refining, having been found 

 in some of them. 



Lumps of copper, which contain no traces of gold, have also been 

 discovered, although the copper ores of the districts are found asso- 

 ciated with that metal, and it is therefore evident that the ancient 

 people who worked these mines were acquainted with a method of 

 refining gold. 



The smelting was effected in small furnaces made of red bricks, 

 and 01 which Gmelin found nearly a thousand in the eastern parts 

 of Siberia. The height and breadth of these were about two feet, 

 and the width three. They were also furnished with holes in two of 

 their opposite sides, the one for the introduction of bellows, and the 

 other for the escape of the metal and slags. In the neighbourhood 

 of the furnaces were found large quantities of broken pottery, to- 

 gether with numerous heaps of scorise, which indicate that operations 

 to a very considerable extent, have at some period been carried on 

 in that locality. 



Gmelin likewise found in the same districts the remains of various 

 furnaces which had been employed for the extraction of silver, and 

 remarked that the lead with which it was associated had been thrown 

 away in the scorise, whilst the whole of the silver was carefully ex- 

 tracted. By what means this was effected, in this particular case, 

 is of course impossible for us to say, although it is highly probable 

 that cupellation in some form was resorted to. Diodorus (III. 14) 

 informs us, that gold was purified by being melted and heated in 

 earthen pots, together with an alloy of tin and lead, to which salt 

 and barley-bran were added, and that the fire was kept up during 

 five successive days. Another ancient author* states, that gold was 

 melted by a gentle fire with the addition of salt, nitre, and alum, and 

 that the same process was employed for refining silver. It is, how- 

 ever, difficult to understand what action these substances, with the 

 exception of the nitre, could have on the purification of silver and 

 gold, and we may therefore conclude, that the action of the air was 

 after all the chief means of oxidation employed.f 



* Hippocrates de Diaeta, 193. 



t The nitre of the Ancients was probably carbonate of soda. 



