150 Intelligence and Miscellaneoris Articles. 



change in the volatility, the melting-point, divisibility, and the che- 

 mical properties, as I showed some years since. 



6. The utricular condition may therefore continue for a consider- 

 able time under the other apparent forms of this body. Further, we 

 may recognize in this circumstance the cause of the diversities of 

 the physical and chemical properties which the different kinds of 

 sulphur present. 



7. The density of sulphur is one of the principal, variable, physical 

 properties which are directly correlative with the persistence of the 

 utricular form among the other apparent forms of sulphur. — Comptes 

 Rendus, No. 21, November 1852, p. 748. 



ON THE OCCURRENCE OF GOLD IN PENNSYLVANIA. 

 BY CHARLES M. WETHERILL, PH.D. 



In the spring of 1851, an earth was given to me for examination, 

 of which the locality was not exactly stated but which was said to 

 have been taken not far from the city, in which gold was detected. 

 The earth was said to have been obtained in digging a well. Several 

 months later, while in Reading, I met with a notice in a German 

 newspaper of that place, which stated that some time previously an 

 earth had been found in digging a well, upon the land of Mr. Yoder, 

 Franconia Township, Montgomery county, which proved, upon 

 examination, to contain gold. I have no doubt but that this is 

 the locality of the earth which I examined. Several rocks from 

 the neighbourhood were analyzed, consisting of clay slate rock, 

 ferruginous quartz, decayed in places, containing pyrites and mag- 

 netic oxide of iron-sand. In most of these gold was detected in 

 traces. Some specimens contained no gold whatever. The earth 

 from the well, which was more particularly examined, consisted of 

 sand and gravel, coating in some places fragments of shale or other 

 rock. A careful examination of these with the lens detected a rather 

 thick spangle of gold adhering to the gravel, and a small rounded 

 mass of a white malleable metal, which proved by a micro-chemical 

 investigation upon half of it to be native tin, which occurs only, 

 according- to Dana, in small grayish-white metallic grains along with 

 Siberian gold. It melted before the blowpipe, was oxidized by nitric 

 acid, the resulting oxide being insoluble in tartaric acid, and dissolved 

 slowly in HCl, with which solution HS gave the yellowish-brown pre- 

 cipitate SnS-f-SnS^. This occurrence of native tin is strongly 

 opposed to the supposition of fraud in the earth examined. Separa- 

 ting the rock and washing, gave a further quantity of very fine 

 gold spangles, mingled with pyrites and magnetic oxide of iron, 

 together with more spangles of native tin. One pound and a half 

 of the original substance, from which these spangles were removed, 

 after separation of the rocks and concentration by washing, was 

 melted with twice its weight of litharge (previously tested for 

 gold), and a small quantity of charcoal powder. The resulting 

 button of lead was cupelled (adding to the lead the gold already 

 found) and the silver treated with nitric acid, which left a coherent 

 mass of gold weighing 0006 grm. One hundred pounds of the 



