August 3, 1872.] 
THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS 
85 
out into troughs, which convey them to an iron cauldron, 
from which they are transferred to the wrought-iron 
flasks in which they are sent to market. Each flask 
contains 76| lb., the equivalent of 75 lb. Spanish mea¬ 
sure, and is worth 40 dollars. It was strange to see this 
fluid treasure come flowing and flashing down like a 
mountain stream, to see it dipped up like so much spring 
water. The unstable, illusive character of this costly 
product is not understood by all visitors. Young and 
curious tourists have been known to attempt to carry 
away a thimble full or so in their pockets, and have con¬ 
fessed to having at once experienced a singular trickling, 
tickling sensation, usually passing like a streak of cold 
lightning down the right leg and into a hoot. One 
elderly gentleman, by profession clerical, hut by tem¬ 
perament mercurial, once succeeded in secreting a por¬ 
tion of quicksilver in his spectacle-case, which he 
carried in the same breast pocket with his watch. His 
little theft was not discovered at the time, hut the next 
morning he indignantly proclaimed that he had been 
robbed. His valuable gold repeater had been taken 
from his pocket, and a silver watch put in its place. 
The contents of the spectacle-case had also mysteriously 
disappeared. Quicksilver in the mass has such a 
molten look that you shrink from touching it; but it is 
exceedingly cold. It gives you a strange sensation to 
plunge your hand into the solid, fluid, heavy, buoyant 
substance, which has the very chill of death, yet is alive 
in every infinitesimal globule. There seemed to be 
something unsubstantial about it, after all. I could 
clutch it, but not hold it. It was like palpable moon¬ 
shine. I dipped my hand in up to the wrist, and not a 
particle adhered to my fingers. Silver never would 
stay by me. The manager first showed us the reduc¬ 
tion works, of which I have tried to give some slight 
idea. I was surprised at the number of chambers 
necessary for the thorough condensation of the vapour. 
It sometimes passes through 10 or 11 before all the 
quicksilver is precipitated. The uncondensed and 
deleterious portions are carried on by flues into an 
immense high chimney, which lets them off when they 
can do no harm to man or beast. The stories of miners 
and mules ‘ perishing gloomily ’ of mercurial poison; 
of unhappy smelters ‘ working out their own salivation 
with fear and trembling,’ are no longer to be credited. 
Erom the works we drove up the mountain to the new 
tunnel, which is the one most worked at this time. It 
is several hundred feet below the old workings, is about 
2500ft. in length, 10ft. wide, and well timbered where it 
is not cut through the hardest kind of rock. Into this 
grand tunnel our party was taken in grand style. We 
rode in ore-cars, on blocks of wood, which made the 
most reliable sort of seats. We were drawn by a stout 
and serious-minded mule, and each fellow of us carried 
a lighted candle, stuck in a split stick. Thus we 
plunged into the darkness and silence of the inner earth, 
and woke the sullen echoes with laughter and merry 
shouts, and called out with our flicking torches momen¬ 
tary gleams from crystals imprisoned in the dull rocks 
for ages, dreaming of the light. Looking back from 
the first car in the procession, it had a strange wild 
look, and we all had a sense of something adventurous 
and mysterious, and delightfully awful and Arabian 
Nightish, about the expedition. We should hardly 
have been surprised to come upon the cave of the ‘ Eorty 
Thieves,’ with all their treasure in it—or, when we 
turned back to the day, to have found the door of the 
tunnel closed against us. When about 1800ft. in we 
left our cars and walked the rest of the way, and a wild, 
rough, pitfallish way it was, to drifts, where the men 
are now working at the new discoveries. The ore is 
very fine, and apparently abundant, the cinnabar show- 
ingin wide, long deposits, the rich, red arteries of the heart 
of the old mountain. The air in the tunnel and drifts we 
found not impure, damp, or oppressive, yet we were 
quite willing to return to the outside wind and warmth 
and sunlight, and drive down to the picturesque country- 
house built by General Halleck when he was manager 
of the mine ; and then our friend and host proceeded to 
crown the courtesy which had made for us a day of 
unequalled enjoyment by having attached to his car¬ 
riage four fresh, spirited, handsome horses; and so, in 
such state, he drove us back to our hotel at San Jose, 
through the splendours of sunset and the freshness of 
evening airs. Could anything have been finer or jollier, 
more nobby or nabobby, than that ?”— Times. 
THE LAST NEW METAL, INDIUM.* 
BY WILLIAM ODLTXGr, ESQ., M.B., F.R.S. 
[Concluded from page 67.) 
Lastly, a most important guide to the establishment 
of the atomic weight of a metal is the determination of 
its specific heat. In cooling through the same fall of 
temperature, different bodies, as is well known, give out 
exceedingly different quantities of heat. In the case 
of a pound of bismuth and a pound of brass, for instance, 
both raised to the temperature of boiling water, and then 
immersed in an excess of ice, the quantity of ice melted 
by the pound of brass in cooling down to the freezing 
point, will be found to be more than three times as great 
as the quantity of ice melted by the pound of bismuth. 
Now the determination of the specific heats of most of 
the metals, compared with the specific heat of an equal 
weight of water as unity, has been made with extreme 
care and exactitude by Regnault; and on looking at the 
following list of specific heats, mostly of his determi¬ 
nation, it is evident almost at a glance that the specific 
heats of the metallic elements are inversely as their re¬ 
spective atomic weights. Thus, taking the first and last 
elements on the list for example, it is observable that 
the specific heat of lithium, or 0-94, is weight for weight 
thirtv times greater than the specific heat of bismuth, 
0-03 ; but then the atomic weight of bismuth is thirty 
times greater than that of lithium. And throughout, 
the product of the specific heat into the atomic weight 
of one metal, divided by the product of the specific heat 
into the atomic weight of another metal, is approxima- 
tively equal to one, as shown in the fourth column of 
the following table, in which the product of the specific 
heat into the atomic weight of silver is taken as the 
standard dividend. Now, only last year, concordant 
estimations of the specific heat of indium were made by 
Bunsen and a Russian chemist, Mendelejeff; the mean 
of Bunsen’s two estimations being 0-0569, which it will 
be observed is very close to Regnault’s estimations of 
the specific heats of silver, cadmium and tin. Accord¬ 
ingly, the atomic weight of indium must approximate 
to°the atomic weights of silver, cadmium and tin ; or, in 
other words, it cannot be 37’ 8 x 1 or 37*8 X 2, but 
must be 37‘8x3 = 113*5 ; and the quantity of chlorine 
combined with this weight of indium being three 
times 35’5 parts, indium chloride will necessarily 
appear as a trichloride, and be expressed by the 
formula InC^. The determination ot specific heats 
being a matter of direct experiment, with scarcely any 
ratiocination whatever, it seems impossible for any one 
to observe the relationship subsisting between the 
accepted atomic weights of the metals, deduced from 
experiment by a highly complex train of reasoning, and 
their directly ascertained specific heats, without recogniz¬ 
ing- that in the case of the metals, at any rate, the atomic 
weights of the chemist are something more than vain 
imaginings, but that they are beyond question tne terse 
expression of a fundamental truth in nature. 
The most important chemical characters of indium 
being- thus established, there remains for consideration 
only the question of its affinities to certain ol the pre¬ 
viously-known elements. And seeing that the atomic 
* Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, Jan. 19,1872. 
