EOLIAN GEOLOGY 
165 
mining activity the gold deposits of arid region command close 
attention. The desert is peculiarly the home of the yellow metal, 
which everywhere else is so elusive. It is now known that desert 
lands are literally paved with this glamorous material. When it 
is recalled that no less than one-fifth of the land surface of the 
globe is composed of arid tracts, and that still another one-fifth 
is profoundly influenced by climatic conditions of aridity, the 
gold out-look is almost appalling. 
Thirty centuries have passed since King Solomon of the An¬ 
cients so successfully cornered the world’s gold market and looked 
to fabulous Ophir, in the African desert, for his greatest glory. 
We Moderns are just beginning to rediscover the same intimate 
association of desert and gold. The suggestion has strong scienti¬ 
fic support. There is genetic relationship between the two phe¬ 
nomena which can no longer be ignored. This fact once estab¬ 
lished in a practical way has but one meaning. It points to the 
early overthrow of gold’s supremacy as the world’s great trade 
arbiter. 
In the waterless wastes of the globe nature’s own process is 
taken advantage of by the miners, where “dry washing” is resorted 
to to remove the lighter soil and sands from the heavier gold. 
This winnowing method is the only way of obtaining the precious 
metal from the desert gravels in various parts of central Asia. 
The recent discovery then of the basic principles involved in the 
localization of gold in the vast terrains of desert agglomerates for 
example, and the devising and perfecting of practical and easy 
means of its economical extraction on a large scale bids fair to 
eclipse all other known methods for the copious recovery of the 
metal. It opens up an entirely new field of gold mining. It 
makes feasible mining operations and great enterprises that were 
utterly impossible before. In reducing extraction costs it as far 
surpasses the cyanide process as that treatment did all former 
methods practiced. 
That the desert should be the main gold repository of our globe 
is not alone indicated by the many great mines recently opened 
up in such situations, but it is one of the first of the larger fruits 
of the newly established law of ore localization, which seems 
destined to become one of the first half-dozen great thoughts which 
geological science of the Twentieth century shall bequeath to man- 
