THE SEARCH FOR IT PAST AND PRESENT.

Since the dawn of history man has attached to gold a value greater than that of any of the metals. Indeed, the value of every product of Mother Earth, of the fields, the forest or the mine has been fixed by its worth in gold. Hence the quest of gold has inspired mankind to acts of heroism, to a search for knowledge, and to a resignation to hardship and privation that have given to the explorer and prospector a character scarcely second to that of the heroes of the battlefield or the leaders of the world's senates. The history of the human race, even the record of the discovery of continents, is largely a history of the search for the yellow treasure in its hiding places in the earth or among the elements of Nature. Columbus' voyage, which gave to the world America, with its California and now its Klondyke, was but a search for gold. Chemistry is only the offspring of alchemy, and while adventurous spirits were daring the main, suffering the torments of the tropics and the gloom of the wilderness, the hut and the cave of the hermit—man's first laboratories—were the scene of other labors and privations, and all in the search for gold, gold, whether in the ground, the water or the air. But it has remained to our own day to witness this quest extended to the region of eternal snow and rewarded among the glacial mountains of the frozen North.