284 
GEOLOGY OF NORTH CAROLINA. 
in North Carolina was picked up in 1799, in a little branch at the Reid 
plantation, Cabarrus county. It weighed between three and four lbs., 
and was kept several years without its real character being suspected ; 
subsequently it was sold to a jeweller, in Fayetteville, for $3.50. When 
its true character became known, search was made for more, and fourteen 
lumps, weighing in the aggregate 153 lbs. troy, were obtained at the same 
locality. 
The gold veins and gravel deposits were afterwards discovered ; and 
for a considerable time gold operations were conducted in many localities 
on a comparatively large scale. The discoveries of gold in California, 
where a far richer harvest was promised, led to the abandonment of many 
of those enterprises; other causes have also influenced in the same direc- 
tion, as, for example, the difficulties connected with deep vein mining, 
and the impossibility of extracting the gold by the imperfect and slow 
machinery then principally in use, the Chilian Mill and Arastra, etc., 
from heavy ores like pyrite, &c., which nature has not already decom- 
posed. With the exception of minute quantities of telluride, in the very 
rare mineral nagyagite, at the King’s mountain mine, gold in North Car 
olina is always found in the metallic state. It is rarely quite pure, but 
generally alloyed with more or less silver. It occurs in crystals or crys- 
talline masses, in thin plates or laminae, between the foliation of the slates 
or through associated minerals, such as quartz, pyrite, galenite, zinc- 
blende, etc., in such a fine state of division that it is generally invisible 
to the eye. 
It has been observed in four different geological positions : 
1st. It is met with in the mass of the gneissoid, granitic and horn- 
blendic rocks. 
2. In quartz veins, often associated with pyrite, chalcopyrite, galenite 
tetradymite and other minerals. 
3. In ore beds, cotemporary with the strata of rocks in which they are 
found, as in chloritic and talcose slates, argillites, quartzites, etc. 
4. Loosely in the soil and decomposed rocks, especially in gravel de- 
posits, resulting from the destruction of the above first three formations. 
One of the most remarkable features peculiar to the rocks of the Southern 
States is their rapid disintegration. 
In some of the auriferous regions of North Carolina, quartz veins are 
very numerous ; in others, they are less frequently met with. 
Most of them are exceedingly small, varying in width from the thick- 
ness of a knife’s blade to a few inches, and often extending in depth but 
a few feet ; some bulge out and form nests and pockets in the rocks, while 
others again are of enormous size, and are known to exist as deep as they 
