1864. | Mining, Mineralogy, and Metallurgy. 698 
for the purpose of making gold. Very large premises were taken, and 
much apparatus placed in position to carry out the most recent attempt 
at transmutation, Bismuth was to have entered largely into the pro- 
cess, and all that could be obtained was purchased by the company 
regardless of price. Of course, no gold has been made, and to save, out 
of the wreck, as much as possible, the deluded shareholders are 
cautiously selling their stock of bismuth, so as to obtain as high a 
price as possible, and thus by a legitimate process convert it into gold. 
Few things can show more strikingly than this does the deficiency of 
knowledge amongst a large and respectable class of people. It was 
not long since that the writer of this notice was positively told by some 
gentlemen, that they were about to extract aluminium from quartz, and 
if embarking a large sum of money in so wild a scheme may be 
regarded as a proof of their conviction that this was possible, that 
proof certainly existed. Still more recently a man supposed to be an 
experienced miner has returned from abroad, bringing with him what he 
regarded as very fine specimens of tin, whereas they are only crystals 
of wolfram (tungstate of iron), and consequently valueless. Such 
instances surely show the necessity of making some of the sciences 
part of our ordinary educational system. 
It has always been a complaint that there is a considerable loss of 
silver in the reduction of that precious metal from the rich ores of the 
Mexican mines. M. Poumaréde has turned his attention to this, and 
in a communication to the Paris Academy of Sciences he states his 
belief that this is due to an imperfect chloridization of the silver, and 
consequently irregularity of action. He states that if finely-powdered 
quartz be mixed with about 1 per cent. of silver powder and 2 or 3 per 
cent. of salt, and heated for half-an-hour to redness in a covered cruci- 
ble, all the silver will be found to have passed into the form of chloride, 
soluble in ammonia. If the silver is in the form of sulphide, or any 
other compound, the same result is obtained. When, instead of quartz, 
we use felspar,—either with or without earthy carbonates, oxide of 
iron, or other constituents of the veinstone,—the same conversion into 
chloride takes places in an equally complete manner. The applica- 
tion of this in the processes of reducing silver ores is obvious. 
Attention is again being directed to the combination of tungsten 
with steel. Some years since Mr. R. Oxland patented a process for 
separating wolfram (tungstate of iron) from tin, and it was proposed 
to employ the tungstate of soda obtained in the process as a mordant, 
and the metallic tungsten as an alloy with iron. M. Jacob subse- 
quently made steel, with tungsten in its composition, and carried out . 
some large and apparently satisfactory experiments at Sheffield and in 
Austria. The results were so promising that M. Jacob gained posses- 
sion of nearly all the sources of wolfram in this country. For several 
years, however, nothing has been heard of this alloy. 
Now M. Le Guen has solicited attention to what he calls wolframed 
pig-iron. Experiments have been made at Brest, and the pig tested 
was found to offer a greatly-increased resistance when less than 2 per 
cent. of wolfram had been added to the iron. Another description of 
pig-iron, formed of one-third of best old English pig and two-thirds of 
