e cleats across a wooden chute for carrying
water. Put mercury in the grooves or before the cleats, and shovel
auriferous gravel and sand into the rushing water. The mercury will
bibulously drink into itself all the fine invisible gold, while the
unaffectionate sand goes on, bereaved of its wealth.

Put gold-bearing quartz under an upright log shod with iron. Lift and
drop the log a few hundred times on the rock, until it is crushed so
fine that it flows over the edge of the trough with constantly going
water, and an amalgam of mercury spread over the inclined way down
which the endusted water flows will drink up all the gold by force of
natural affection therefor.

Neither can the gold be seen in the mercury. But it is there. Squeeze
the mercury through chamois skin. An amalgam, mostly gold, refuses to
go through. Or apply heat. The mercury flies away as vapor and the
gold remains.

If thou seekest for wisdom as for silver, and searchest for her as for
hid treasure, thou shalt find.

NATURAL AFFECTION BETWEEN METAL AND LIQUID

A little boy had a silver mug that he prized very highly, as it was the
gift of his grandfather. The boy was not born with a silver spoon in
his mouth, but, what was much better, he had a mug often filled with
what he needed.

One day he dipped it into a glass jar of what seemed to him water, and
letting go of it saw it go to the bottom. He went to find his father
to fish it out for him. When he came back his heavy solid mug looked
as if it were made of the skeleton leaves of the forest when the green
chlorophyll has decayed away in the winter and left only the gauzy
veins and veinlets through which the leaves were made. Soon even this
fretwork was gone, and there was no sign of it to be seen. The liquid
had eaten or drank the solid metal up, particle by particle. The
liquid was nitric acid.

The poor little boy had often seen salt, and especially sugar, absorbed
in water, but never his precious solid silver mug, and the bright
tears rolled down his cheeks freely.

But his father thought of two things: First, that the blue tint told
him that the jeweler had sold for silver to the grandfather a mug that
was part copper; and secondly, that he would put some common salt into
the nitric acid--which it liked so much better than silver that it
dropped the silver, just as a boy might drop bread when he sought to
fill his hands with cake.

So the father recovered the invi