Chap. XIX.] 
GOLD IN BRITAIN. 
449 
nature of the gold-bearing rocks themselves, as well as the limits of the 
auriferous Drift, whether gravel or other superficial materials. 
Appealing to the structure of the different countries which at former periods 
have afforded, or still afford, any notable amount of gold, we find in all a general 
agreement. Whether, referring to ancient history, we cast our eyes to the 
countries watered by the Pactolus of Ovid, to the Phrygia and Thrace of the 
Greeks, to the Alps * and golden Tagus of the Romans, to the Bohemia of 
the Middle Ages, to tracts in Britain which were worked in old times, and have 
either been long abandoned or are now scarcely at all productive, or to those 
chains in America and Australia which, previously unsearched, have in our 
times proved so rich, — we invariably find the same constants in nature. In 
all these lands gold has been imparted abundantly to those ancient rocks only 
whose order and succession we have traced in the foregoing Chapters, and, as I 
believe, by the agency of the associated eruptive rocks. The original position 
of the metal most usually is in quartzose veinstones traversing altered Palaeozoic 
slates (often Lower Silurian f), frequently near their junction with eruptive rocks, 
it being also found diffused through the body of rocks of igneous origin. The 
Palaeozoic accumulations which followed from the Lower Silurian up to the Car- 
boniferous inclusive, however (and chiefly the oldest of them), have been the 
deposits which, in the tracts where they have undergone a metamorphosis or 
change of structure by igneous agency, or have been penetrated by quartz- 
veins, are the chief sources whence gold has been or is derived. 
However we may account for them, the facts are those which I have for 
many years exposed — viz. that besides igneous rocks, whether granites or 
diorites, which have carried up gold in their matrix, certain geological zones 
only in the crust of the globe have been rendered richly auriferous. 
Gold in Britain. — The British auriferous examples, comparatively small in 
produce as they have been, will be first briefly alluded to, because the reader 
can at once refer, in the coloured map of this work, to two districts of Wales 
wherein gold has been found, and in one of which it is now in the course of 
extraction. (See the golden-spotted patches in North and South Wales.) 
In the Lower Silurian rocks, about ten miles west of Llandovery, at a spot 
called Gogofau, near Llan-piimp-saiut, large white quartzose veinstones, tra- 
versing slaty masses, were cut into by the Romans, who excavated lofty galleries, 
which are still open. That enterprising people evidently derived gold from 
portions of these veinstones. Many gold ornaments have, in fact, been found at 
the adjacent Roman Station of Cynfil-Cayo, with traces of aqueducts, built 
probably to convey water to wash the gold. Even the grindstones % and troughs 
used in abrading the hard matrix are yet to be seen. 
* In truth, as above expressed, every old only one-eighth, in smelting ; in others it required 
country of Europe where the rocks were once auri- more smelting, but was very profitable. Italians 
ferous has long ceased to yield any valuable amount aiding the Barbarians in the working tor two 
of gold. In reference to the Alps, I am indebted months, gold became forthwith one-third cheaper 
to my lamented friend the late Mr. J. W. Cowell over the whole of Italy; and the Taurisci disco- 
for pointing out to me the following passage in vering this, drove the associate Italians away and 
Strabo (Book iv. ch. 6. sect. 12), by which it ap- monopolized it themselves. At present all gold- 
pears that even Imperial Borne was at one time mines belong to the Eomans." 
inundated with a glut of gold from her northern t Gold has recently been detected m a veinstone 
mountains : — " Polybius says that in his time the even in the Laurentian rocks of North America, 
gold mines were so rich about [north of?] Aqui- J See ' Silurian System,' p. 368. At the time ot 
leia, but especially in the country of the Taurisci the publication of that work (1839) I had not 
Norici, that if you dug but two feet below the visited the Ural Mountains, and was little ac- 
surface you found gold, and that the diggings (ge- quainted with the nature of gold-bearing rocks 
nerally) were not deeper than 15 feet; that in and the methods employed for the extraction ot 
some instances the gold was found pure, in lumps the metal, or I should at once have recognized 
of the size of a bean or a lupin, and which lost as certain what I only ventured to suggest— that 
2 G 
