286 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1904. 



In 1829 Mitchell published in the American Journal of Science an 



article in which he threw doubt upon the statements and theories of 



Olmsted and Rothe regarding the origin and occurrence of gold in the 



State. It will be remembered that Olmsted considered 



Mitcfiell's Criticism .. .. . , . . , , . ,, 



of Olmsted and Rothe, the gold to be limited to the area occupied by the 



i 829 



argillite, while Rothe considered granite as the base 

 of the gold-bearing formations. Olmsted further argued that the gold 

 occurred in the diluvial formation, while Rothe believed that the gold 

 now found in the alluvial was derived from veins and spread over the 

 country by a flood of waters breaking through the Blue Ridge and 

 rushing in torrents over the entire gold-bearing region/' 



Mitchell's idea, which is undoubtedly the correct one, was that the 

 gold occurred originally in veins and perhaps in part disseminated 

 throughout the country rock, which was in itself in part primitive and 

 in part secondary. From these rocks it was set free through atmos- 

 pheric decomposition and subsequently distributed by gravity and 

 running water. 



Mitchell's paper is of further interest in that it contains a colored 

 geological map of the gold region, the rocks being classified as primi- 

 tive, transition or slate, old-red sandstone, and alluvium. 



Although the da}^ of the cosmogonist was fast drifting into the 

 obscurity of the past, there were, nevertheless, occasional writers 

 who still preferred to ignore facts of observation or the efficiency of 

 simple causes and to seek for more difficult or more 

 tJ?e P r>?ft S /i d 828° n mystical methods of accounting for phenomena than 

 those furnished by the observation of processes now 

 in action. Thus Benjamin Tappan, in discussing the bowlders of prim- 

 itive and transition rock found in Ohio (glacial erratics), objected to the 

 commonly accepted idea that such were necessarily foreign to the local- 

 ity, brought by currents of water or floating ice in immense inland lakes. 

 He frankly acknowledged, however, his own inability to account for 

 their presence, but ingenuously claimed that "ignorance is preferable 

 to error," ancLadded: "It may therefore be asked why ma} T not these 

 rocks have been created where they are now found?" Or, "Again, 

 why may they not have been thrown out by earthquakes or volcanoes? " 



Groping though this writer may have been, it is questionable if his 

 ignorance were not preferable to the kind of knowledge manifested 

 by a writer (signature "A") in the American Journal of Science of 

 two years previous, who would account for the drift on the supposition 

 that the earth's revolution, amounting to 1,500 feet a second, was 

 suddenly checked. This, he thought, would result in the whole mass 



« Rothe had previously (1826) expressed the idea that the gold was derived from 

 the bursting asunder of the gold-bearing veins by subterranean explosions and the 

 gold thus scattered over the adjacent regions, some of it being carried down in the 

 water courses. 



