6+0 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



light niediiim as water when it has been reduced to sufficiently 

 minute particles or scalelike forms. It is little wonder that a gen- 

 eral belief has gained currency with the more enthusiastic locators 

 that the sand gold is a deposition or precipitate from the sea. 



The gold itself occurs in an exceedingly fine state of subdi- 

 vision, too fine in most cases to be caught without mercury or the 

 best arrangement of " blanketings." Much of it is really in the 

 condition of colors dissected nearly to their finest particles, and it 

 is hardly surprising that it should have so long escaped detection. 

 Occasionally pieces to the value of three to six cents are obtained 

 in the pans, and I was witness to the finding of a scale with the value 

 of perhaps nearly twenty cents. The usual magnetitic particles are 

 associated with the gold, and their origin can clearly be traced to 

 the magnetite which is so abundantly found in some of the schists 

 (micaceous, chloritic, and talcose schists), which, judged by the 

 fragments and bowlders that everywhere lie in the path of the 

 streams of the tundra, must be closely similar to the series of 

 schists of the Klondike region. The particles of fragmented gar- 

 net, which by their astonishing abundance give so distinctive a 

 coloring to the layers which they compose or constitute, are of 

 about the ordinary fineness of seashore sand, perhaps a trifle 

 coarser, but occasionally much coarser particles or masses of par- 

 ticles are found; and in the placer deposits of Anvil Creek, as in 

 the bunch of claims around " Discovery " — about five miles due 

 north of Nome — fragments of the size of lentils are not uncommon. 

 I have seen full garnets obtained from the wash here which were 

 of the size of small peas. Nodules of manganese (manganite, pyro- 

 lusite) are at intervals found with them, and some stream-tin (cas- 

 fiiterite), as in the Klondike region, also appears to be present. 

 Apart from the evidence that is brought down by the magnetite 

 and garnet, it would naturally be assumed that the gold had its 

 primal source in the mountains back of the coast. These, as has 

 already been stated, have undergone exhaustive degradation, and 

 the materials resulting from their destruction, in whatever way 

 brought about, have been thrown into the sea, and there adjusted 

 and readjusted — or, so far as the gold particles are concerned, one 

 might say " concentrated." Latterly, and perhaps this is also true 

 to-day, the land has undergone elevation, and exposed much that 

 until recently properly belonged to the sea. The tundra is a part 

 of this ocean floor, and it too doubtless contains much gold, per- 

 haps even very much. 



The length of the sea strip that was worked during the past 

 summer, and so far in autumn as the clemency of the weather per- 

 mitted, covered a nearly continuous thirty or thirty-five miles, 



