THE GOLD SANDS OF CAPE NOME. 639 



that of some of the regions of Greenland which have only quite 

 recently been vacated by the glaciers, while the composition of the 

 shingle — the inclusion over so long a front of bowlders from beyond 

 the first line of mountain heights, many of them most markedly 

 grooved and polished — is also highly suggestive of glacial deposition. 

 The gold sands, or sands that are worked for gold, are merely 

 the ordinary materials of the beach, loose and incoherent like mqst 

 seashore sands, and particularly defining horizons three to six feet 

 below the surface. In regular stratified layers, with fine and mod-. 

 erately coarse gravel, they embrace four or five distinct layers of 

 f rag-mented garnets (the components of the so-called " ruby sand "), 

 and it is from these, and at this time almost exclusively from the 



The Harbor of Snake Eiver (Nome). 



bottom layer of three to five inches thickness, which is popularly 

 described as lying on " bed rock " — in most places merely a hard-pan 

 of arenaceous clay or argillaceous sand, with no true rock to define 

 it — that most of the gold is obtained. Each ruby band nearer to 

 the top seems to contain less and less gold, and there is no ques- 

 tion that the different layers are merely reformations by the sea 

 from those of earlier deposition, just as surface shingle deposits 

 generally are in part reconstructions of underlying beds. That 

 the ocean is to-day depositing the ruby sand is unmistakably shown 

 by the great patches of this sand lying on the surface and its in- 

 coming in the path of nearly every storm. Even these surface 

 sands are mildly gold-bearing, sho\ying that the gold, despite its 

 high specific gravity, may be buoyed up and wafted in by such a 



