EL DORADO.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXVIII, Issue 7952, 30 January 1906, Page 7

EL DORADO.

Ouoo again the fabulous ElDorado, whioh is to bring untold "wealth to the world, is being paraded before a credulous public. This -time it is a chemist, whu is pointing out tbat the sea is full of gold which baß been dissolved in its depths for more benturias than man oan count years. A grain of gold, whioh io vorth about twopence, is supposed to exist in every ton of water, and as there are about sixty thousand billion tons of water in the ocean, anyone who oan recover all the gold will have a nice little fortune of about £625,000,000,000,000, for over five thousand million tons of soliid gold. The patioular ohetnist who has discovered the latest method of extracting the gold does not want all this lot in one lamp. He would probably find it diffloult to handle. His system is baaed upon the popular belief •that gold regions grow with advancing years. This action is mysterious •even to the scientists. One authority suggests that a piece of iron pyrites has been lying in the water, ■and that the gold has been deposited upon it by a sort of eleotrolytio •aotion, the iron pyrites being the positive pole and wasting away tha iron into hematite, which js often -found neav a nugget, and the sulphur into sulphuric aoid, while' the gold keeps attracting more gold from the water, and thus is continually electroplating itself. , One thing is certain. Mature leaves a substance in *the rivers bringing dissolved gold from the' mountains which attracts the cold into nuggets. This is just where the ohemist comes in. If Nature oan do this, why not manf Continuous experiments have been going on for years, and several substanoes have been found to possess the the power of preoipi tating dissolved gold. Strangest of all the discoveries is that,of the influence of organic substanoes on -gold, its affection for matter whioh has formed the living tissue of ani trials or plants. The difficulty is to get a substance which will not only precipitate the gold, but will also •collect it. Otherwise, the gold will merely flow away like powder and settle on some forgdtten sandbank, miles away from civilisation. It is this substance whioh the particular chemist claims to have discovered. It is only reasonable, of course, that, with "fortune in his grasp beyond the dreams of avarice," he should decline to disclose the exaut nature [of his discovery.