more rapidly than the decrease of the lavoirs of the Ural; where have been worked at first and unfortunately in too hasty a manner, the richest beds of sand. In the hydrostatic methods used, there is undoubtedly wasted a large quantity of precious metal, attached as it is to grains of oxide of iron and other light substances. This is not the place to discuss if the ingenious mode proposed by Colonel Anossow, the intendant at Slatoust, which promises such excellent results and which consists in fusing the mineral with iron and treating the mass with sulphuric acid-is susceptible of employment on a large scale under all the circumstances of the size of the fused masses, the labor in transporting sand containing such a small per centage of gold, and the great quantity of fuel which would be required. Trials, long and welldirected, seem hitherto to pronounce against the practicability of this method. The notions, which have been obtained in the last fifteen years, of the gold-riches still waiting to be derived from Northern Asia, make one involuntarily think of the Issedonians, the Arimaspians and those griffins, guardians of immense treasures, which Aristæus of Proconnesus and, two hundred years after him, Herodotus, have made so famous.* I have had the good fortune to visit, in the Southern Ural, localities where, a few inches below the surface, have been discovered, near together, brilliant masses of gold of 13, of 15, and even of 24 Russian pounds: [11.7 lb., 13.5 lb. and 21.6 lb. avdp. respectively.]† It may be that masses much larger have been found formerly in the shape of rounded lumps and lying exposed on the surface. There would be nothing astonishing, then, if from the most remote antiquity, this gold has been gathered by a hunting and pastoral people,-if the report of riches so considerable, echoed afar and spread from the shores of the Euxine Sea to the Hellenic colonies who very soon had relations with the North-east of Asia beyond the Caspian Sea and Lake Aral. The merchant Greeks and even the Scythians did not themselves penetrate as far as to the Issedonians; they trafficked only with the Argippœans. Niebuhr, in his researches upon the Scythians and the Getians (researches that have failed of confirmation from what we know at the present day of the difference of races and the affinities of languages among the people of Northern Asia) places the Issedonians and the Arimaspians to the north of Orenburg and therefore just in that gold region now so well known, lying on the eastern slope of the Southern Ural. This opinion is supported in the solid work (quite re * In the Fragments of Alcman which Mr. Welcker has commented on, as well as in those of Hecateus and of Damastes, there is alike mention made of the Issedones. (Hec. Milet. Fragm. ed. Klausen. n. 168, p. 92.) The largest lump of gold found as yet in the Ural (at Alexandrowsk, near Miask) is 8 inches long by 52 wide and 43 thick. It weighs 24 pounds 69 zolotnic Russian [22.29 lb. avdp.] and is preserved at S. Petersburg in the magnificent collection of minerals of the Mining Corps. Among the lumps of platina of NischneTagilsk (the property of Demidoff) have been found three weighing 13, 19 and 20 pounds Russian, respectively. Rose: Reise nach dem Ural, vol. i. p. 41. Klein historiche und philologische Schriften; p. 361. (See also the Herodotische Welt-tafel of Niebuhr.) cently published) by the Counsellor of State, Eichwald, under the title:* Ancient Geography of the Caspian Sea. Heeren and Völker place the gold-region of Herodotus in the Altaï; and, I confess, this opinion seems to me the more justified by the configuration of the localities. Herodotus describes a commercial route by which the gold of the Northern Altaï (or rather as I suppose the repute of this gold) might reach the Euxine by the intermediary Issedonians and Scythians. To penetrate to the Argippæans with their bald heads, flat noses and large chins, the Scythians and the Greeks of the Pontic colonies had to have recourse in their commerce to seven interpreters of as many different languages.{ Since the discovery of such rich deposites of auriferous sand in the spur which the Altaï throws out to the North as far as the parallel of Tomsk, the opinion of the Arimaspians having inhabited a country east of the Ural and very far from this mountain-chain, gains certainly probability. In the conjecture of a learned and acute traveller, Adolph Erman, the myth of the griffins attaches to the fossil remains of the antediluvian pachyderms so frequently occurring in Northern Siberia, and in which the hunters believe they see the talons and head of a gigantic bird. If, concludes Mr. Erman, we will agree to see in this ancient tradition the prototype of the Greek myth, we have entire foundation for saying that the miners took the gold from the bosom of the griffins; for nothing is more common at this day, as formerly, than to meet with auriferous sand in strata containing fossils of the kind. However plausible this explication, there is one fact against it, viz. the mention of these fabulous creatures, the griffins, in the poems of Hesiod where under the form of monsters half lion, half eagle, they adorn the gates of Persepolis; and that they early reached Greece by way of Miletus.T A celebrated Russian academician, Mr. Gräfe, is inclined to regard a monster with enormous teeth-the odontotyrannus spoken of by the Byzantine Historians** and by Julius Valerius whose works have been discovered by Maï-as a vague reminiscence of the Siberian mammoth, as a distant echo from the primeval world. This tyrannus, however, * Eichwald, like Reichard, derives the name Issedonian from the river Isset; and regards this people as a tribe of the Vogul. Heeren: Ideen über Politik und Verkehr; vol. i. sec. 2, p. 281–287, ed. 1824. Völker: Mythische Geographie der Griechen und Römer; vol. i. p. 188 and 191, and the commentary on this work by Klausen in the Scheuzeitung for 1832, p. 653. Völker has collected with the greatest care the passages from the ancient authors, which I do not specially cite here. These Argippæans lived on the fruit of the arbor Ponticus whose juice was called aschy; the mass of which after having been strained is kneaded into cakes or balls. [Herod. Melpom. c. 23.] Nemnich and Heeren have already thought to find in this the Prunus padus (vol. i. sec. 2, p. 385.) See also Erman: Reise um die Erde; vol. i. p. 307. § Herodotus: iv. 24. C. O. Muller: Dorier [the Dorians] vol. ii. p. 276. Upon the Griffin of Ctesias, as a Bactro-Indian animal, see Heeren n. s. vol. i. sec. i. p. 239; and Bottiger: Griech. Vasengemälde; vol. i. n. 3, p. 105. Herodotus also (iv. 79. 152) speaks twice of griffins as images and ornaments. [** Cedrenus: Collect. Byzant. T. ix. p. 153. Glycas: ib. T. xi. p. 142-143] ft Gräfe: in the Mem. of the Acad. of S. Petersburg; 1830, p. 71 and 74. Julius Valerius in the Res Gestæ Alexandri etc. [Milan 1817] lib. iii. c. 33. See besides the Chronique Hamartol; which Hase has obtained in the MS. of the Paris Library. as well as the ancient myth of the griffins does not seem to me to have risen from the icy bosom of these northern alluvial lands; they appear to me rather the imaginative creatures of a southern zone and a warmer clime. I mentioned just now that they find in the Ural enormous masses of gold some inches below the surface. Little water-drains, or a good many other operations equally insignificant, may have by degrees bared those masses until they appear some day at the very surface itself. Can we see aught but a myth in the story of the sacred gold of the Scythians which Herodotus tells, and in that of the agricultural implements of gold which fell from Heaven and which the two princes, the sons of the king [Targitaus] who first approached could not touch without being: burnt, while the youngest, Colaxais, bore unharmed the cooling metal home? or is it rather a remote memory of a fall of aëroliths in a state of ignition?* Iron and gold, are they here taken for one another; and was the sacred gold but a meteoric stone, like the mass found by Pallas, out of which implements of labor could be forged, just as the Esquimaux of Baffin's Bay make yet to this day their knives from aëroliths half buried in the snow? I know that physical explanations of ancient myths and of modern miracles are not in favor now, and that I run the risk of straying into the errors of the Alexandrian grammarians: but it is pardonable for a naturalist to suggest the fall of bolids. Perhaps the heavenly metal only burned to drive off the elder brothers? Even according to the popular belief in Germany, the place of buried treasures always bakes and burns. But considerations like these take us off from researches purely physical. These beds of auriferous sand in Northern Asia on this side the Obi, this amount of 130 poods [4688.77 lb. avdp.] the yield of one year [1837] in the Altaï or Kusnezki, is an event in the history of the commerce of gold; and an event the more important, since it happens in that part of Asia which is under the immediate domination of Europe, and since the product of the workings, flowing towards the West, exercises its influence altogether upon the commerce of Europe. However ancient may be in Asia the workings of the mineral (so to speak) in place-known under the vague denomination of Tchoudic veins,† the existence of considerable masses of manufactured gold found at the earliest occupation of the country in the sepulchres and of which such remarkable specimens exist in the collections of S. Petersburg, is ex [* Herodotus: Melpom. c. 5. Mr. Humboldt has here given at length the whole chapter in the Latin of Schweighauser. It is a perplexed passage in the original; but as the undoubted substance is retained above in the text, I have thought it allowable to be omitted.] The Massagetians, a tribe of Alans according to Ammianus Marcellinus, used for the furniture of their horses gold as other people do iron. Herod. Clio, c. 215. [See also Judges viii. 26, for the mention of the golden chains for the camels; which the Ishmaelitish Midianites yielded to Jerubbaal.] † What are called Tchoudic veins and the Tchoudic mines of North Asia do not belong to the same stock. The name of this Cabirian race who hunted the mineral and forged the metal, originally signified only foreigners, not Russians [outside barbarians;] but in a more emphatic manner among the Russian annals, according to Klaproth (Asia Polyglotta, p. 184) and the more recent and learned researches of Siogren (Mem. of the Acad. of S. Petersburg; vi. series, vol. i. p. 308) it covers all the Finnish and the Uralian tribes. plained more perfectly by the discovery at remote epochs of lumps of gold in the alluvium immediately below the surface of the ground. Müller, the excellent historian of Siberia, says that the first discoveries of gold in the sepulchres (kourganoui) lowered in a most surprising manner the value of this metal at Krasnojarsk.* Internal Asia, confined between the chain of the Himalaya and the volcanic range called the Celestial Mountains [Thian-chan] forms like China a close realm, as well in a political as (almost in the same degree) in a commercial point of view. However uncertain may be our notions as to this part of the globe, nevertheless from the brilliant epoch of the Mongol Dynasties to the end of the 13th century, since the travels of the Venetian Polo, the fame of these beds of auriferous sand in the interior of Asia has been penetrating to Europe-on the south by the way of India, on the north, through Siberia. The Calcutta journals report that in all Western Thibet, the streams bring down gold; and that the natives extract the metal by amalgamation. Ancient Indian myths make the sovereign of the North, Kouwera, to be the god of riches; and it is remarkable that the residence of this god (Alakâ) is not upon the range of the Himalaya itself, but on the Kailasa on this side of the Himalaya, in Thibet. It is more to the north-west, on this side of the chain of Kouen-loun which separates the districts of Ladakh and Khotan, that Heerent places, with much probability in my opinion, the great Sandy Desert so rich in gold which the Indians bordering on Caspatyrus visited and where ants, smaller than dogs but larger than foxes, burrowed for their nests. The Bolor, whose eastern slope leads to Khoufaloun (a region which the geographers designate under the name of Little Thibet or Kaschgar,) and to the Lake Lop among the steppes, offered also on its western slope to the distinguished traveller who has last explored this terra incognita, Alexander Burnes, the auriferous beds of Durrvaz and of the upper waters of the Oxus, which he has described. In China the extraction of gold by washing, dates from the highest antiquity; and we can distinguish in the metallurgic nomenclature of this pedantic people the fields of golds (beds of gold-ore of vast extent in the plains) and lumps of gold under the name of dog-heads, of wheat-grains, and of millet-seed. Unfortunately in Choco, in Sonora and in the Ural, as every where, there are fewer dog-heads than millet-seed. * Journal Asiatique, t. ii. p. 12. † Albert Höfer: Translation of the Urwasi and the Kalidâsa; 1837, p. 90. Herod. iii. 102-106. Heeren: 1st part, 2d sect. p. 90, 102, 340-345. Compare Ritter: Asia, vol. ii. 657-660. || Burnes: Travels, vol. ii. p. 165. In 1831, they still found in the Oxus lumps of gold as large as a pigeon's-egg. Like the Rhine, the Oxus (Djihoun) rolls its sands of gold down to its mouth; and the unfortunate expedition of Prince Alexander Bekewitsch, undertaken for Peter the Great in 1716, was induced by exaggerated and untruthful statements as to the accumulation of gold near the ancient embou chure of the Oxus, south of the little chain of the Balkan and near the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. Landresse: upon the Auriferous Alluvion of China, in the Asiatic Journal, vol. ii. p. 90. |