THE MYSTERIES OF MINERALS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3797, 15 September 1883, Page 4

THE MYSTERIES OF MINERALS.

painfully evident, even to tho most advanced scientists, that, in tho midst of the multitude of theories, and in the best light that (ho slowly accumulated wisdom of centuries has thrown upon fho question, our real knowledge of the character and formation of minerals is very limited and uncertain. Wonderful progress (flic Mining World says truly) has been made during the last half century in regard to some of the constituent elements of the most common metals and the method of fitting them for utility, but the great problem of their creation and union with other primary elements is still a hidden mystery. Metallurgists have discovered .something of the effects of oxygen, and of hydrogen gas and its intimate and almost inseparable affinity with iron, but the real facts are hidden behind a veil that never has been penetrated.

Iron is generally understood to bo a synonym for solidity* and enduring permanence, yet .science now proves that pure iron is nearly as unstable as water, and exists only as a curiosity in the laboratory. Some chemists claim that hydrogen is itself a metal, and it may be yet .shown that many of the so-called pure melals, now supposed in be simple elements, are in reality compounds which science may be able to separate, perhaps almost info endless divisions. Alumhia has recently come into notice, and a wide field, in view of its inexhaustible resources, opens up and stretches out beyond our grasp into the future. By ifs discovery our common clay is to bo the mother of a mineral whose usefulness in the future cinnofc now bo measured.

It maj' be found that the great oceans of air and water are tho prolific mines from which the miners of the future will draw their supplies of mineral to satisfy the demand of their day and generation. It is already well proved that the atmosphere, the water of the ocean, the planets and comets, contain a perceptible quantity of mineral matter.

From a general harmony of the manifest workings of Nature, it wouldnof.be strange if it should bo discovered that tho vast variety of mineral substances now known, and the perhaps greater variety to be revealed, can be traced back to a common primal centre, and it will bo shown that the infinite varieties of form and character are but different manifestations, under special circumstances, of the same great force driven out into modified expression. Our increasing knowledge of the imponderable force, electricity, will throw much light into the hidden mysteries of the metallic world, and by its sun-like torch wo may be enabled to follow with reverent steps, from the dim threshold of our present knowledge, the footprints of mineral creation to the cradle of its existence.