342 Gold Produce of Siberia. 



slightly explored regions of Siberia. The north and south 

 counterparts of the great Altai, may in truth prove to be but 

 the indications of similar spurs, or detached meridian ridges, 

 which may be discovered in many other tracts of a region 

 equal in extent to the whole of Europe. From the researches 

 of the Russian engineers, and from Humboldt and his asso- 

 ciates, we learn that rocks similar to those which are so 

 auriferous in the Ural, reappear in various parallels of longi- 

 tude along the flanks of the Altai. By a recent letter, indeed, 

 from my friend Colonel Helmersen, the distinguished and 

 successful explorer of the Ural, Altai, and Siberia, I learn 

 that his former associate in these countries, Professor Hoff- 

 man, has, in his last visit of 1843, discovered a tract in 

 Siberia, in which the very richest gold occur in a ' terrain,' 

 exclusively composed of granite and metamorphic schists, the 

 gold being in the latter. Now in the Ural, as in other parts 

 of Siberia, greenstones, syenites, and serpentines, seem in- 

 variably to have been the agents by which the metamorphic 

 rocks have been rendered auriferous ; this discovery, there- 

 fore, widens the field of the gold-searchers, and opens out 

 great probable practical as well as theoretical results. In 

 truth, Siberia, and its adjacent regions, may be found to con- 

 tain another Brazil, where granite also is the great eruptive 

 agent of mineralization and metamorphism. 



" Count Keyserling also assures me, in one of his letters, 

 that the discovery of M. Hoffman relates to an area larger than 

 France^ every part of which seems to be more or less auri- 

 ferous ; and all the subjacent rocks (palaeozoic schists and 

 limestones), when pounded up and analysed, affording a cer- 

 tain per-centage of gold. If this diffusion of gold through 

 the very matrix of rocks, which is, I may observe, a pheno- 

 menon hitherto almost unknown,* be really found to hold 

 good over so vast an area, it imparts a new and most impor- 

 tant element to our reasoning, and renders it vastly more 

 probable that no sort of limit can be set to the increase of 

 the produce of Russian gold. We know also, from our en- 



* *^ In our travels in the Ural we learned, indeed, from General Anosoff 

 at Zlataust, that, by a searching analysis, gold had been discovered dis- 

 seminated in the matrix of some of the limestones south of Miask." 



