OF NEW ALMADEN. 59 
In the warehouse the metal is prepared for market. 
This is done by putting it into wrought iron flasks or 
canisters ‘holding 75 pounds each. It is dipped up 
with ladles, and poured into the flasks through an ordi- 
nary tin funnel. The opening or neck of the flask 
(which in form is something like a junk bottle) is 
then stopped with a close-fitting screw, put in with a 
Vice, so as to make it tight as possible. These flasks, 
which weigh twenty-five pounds each, are all made in 
England, where I suppose they can be furnished much 
cheaper than in the United States. From the ware- 
house the flasks are transported by ox-carts to tide- 
water, about twenty miles distant, whence they are 
shipped to San Francisco. The present (1852) price of 
the metal there is sixty cents a pound, a very great 
reduction from that which the quicksilver from Spain 
has commanded, though of equal quality. A shipment 
of a thousand flasks was lately made to Canton, by way 
of an experiment. In China it is chiefly used in the 
manufacture of vermilion and other articles of com- 
merce, * 
* As this is the only quicksilver mine yet known in the United 
States, and is only second in the world to that of Almaden, in Spain, a 
few words on the latter, and of other quicksilver mines, do not seem inap- 
propriate, 
Quicksilver, or mercury, has been known from the earliest ages, but 
is found nowhere in large quantities, except in Spain and California: 
Almaden has long been famed for its mines of this metal, which, accord- 
ing to Bowles, are the richest in their produce, the most instructive as 
to the mode of working them, the most curious for their natural history, 
and the most ancient in the world. We find them mentioned in Theo- 
phrastus, three hundred years before Christ, and Vitruvius also speaks 
of them. Pliny places Cisapona, or as it is sometimes written Sisapona, 
