66 
TRANSACTIONS OF THE TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
Survey, made an exhaustive examination of the Washoe district and its 
mines; but like von Richthofen he calls principally on fluorine as a solv¬ 
ent, and leaves it an open question, what finally became of all the 
fluorine? Every chemist knows its great affinity for nearly all the ele¬ 
ments, and that not all the fluorine and chlorine combinations are readily 
volatilized. None of the rocks of the Washoe district analyzed by Wood¬ 
ward, Moore, Mixter, Cuntzler, Korman, Johnson contained any fluorine, 
and it is very difficult to think that all the fluorine necessary to dissolve the 
immense quantity of material required to fill the Comstock fissure escaped 
in gaseous shape, where so many elements were present and ready for 
chemical union. If we, however, accept an alkaline solution of the silica 
by hot water, which solution, no doubt, was facilitated by great pressure, 
then the present combinations of the rocks and lodes (sound or decom¬ 
posed) shows up all the elements of the rocks dissolved, and of the solv¬ 
ents. And since it can be demonstrated by experiments that in su'ch 
alkaline solutions of silica most, if not all, acid metal salts grow freely in 
the shape of veins and veinlets, and form pockets in the experimental 
vessels till they reach the surface of the liquid, forming there deposits, 
and that these veins grown in the vessels have the faculty of absorbing 
the solutions of other metals brought in contact with them, it is more 
rational and more natural to presume that the veins grew up in alkaline 
silica solution, and were afterwards changed by heat, steam, liquids, 
gases, vapors, in short by such agents as are shown by the analysis, than 
to suppose a solution by chemical or other agencies of which we find 
no traces in the subsequent deposits and precipitations, not in the veins, 
not in the gangue, and not in the surrounding country rocks. 
I admit an antecedent, simultaneous, or subsequent presence and action 
of gases. In the Comstock lode, more so nearer the surface than at 
greater depth, large ore deposits were struck in cavities in the quartz, the 
origin of which cavities can easily be accounted for if we accept an alka¬ 
line solution of silica. 
A tube containing such an alkaline solution, gelatinized by carbonic 
acid gas, shows in miniature such cavities as }^ou see on charts of the 
Comstock lode. 
We can easily imagine that such cavities were subsequently filled by 
metal solutions and vapors which were directly formed or were subse¬ 
quently changed into that shape in which they finally were mined. 
There were ducts left by the gelatinizing gases in the gelatinized silica, 
which ducts, forming lines of least resistance, were the channels by 
which liquid solutions, gases, and vapors reached the cavities; or if ore 
strings, whose growth and absorptive faculty I demonstrated by experi¬ 
ment, had reached such cavities, they might have also been filled by 
those. 
