e desired to commemorate the ₺ impressed their effigies in mednunciated which by general con ■f life, it was called golden; if a orthy of being kept in ever-prespeople, it was emblazoned in leth, prophecy, or poetry, this same -failing source for the finest of ttractive of figurative illustrae of its first discovery, among all the ignorant and the learned, the ch and the poor, the humble and been, of all material things, the esired most; the one for which, y have been willing to exchange and for the sake of acquiring terial things of greater valueand even life itself. possibly no ply did n with little washing of accessible d the case, the altogether d gold. Instea supposed, it chemists and almost every *In 1862 Mr. of clay having the clay contained ply did not continue. Inat which was obtained пrst with little labor proved to be the result of the decay washing of the rocks through long ages; and when the read accessible or surface deposits became exhausted, as was s the case, the conditions determining the supply of gold beca altogether different. On the one hand, there was no lack gold. Instead of being a very scarce metal, as was for a t supposed, it was found to be so widely disseminated that chemists and metallurgists readily detected traces of gold almost every extensive bed of clay and sand they examined * In 1862 Mr. Eckfelt, then principal assayer at the mint in Philadelp communicated to the American Philosophical Society the result of s exceedingly curious examinations demonstrating the very wide distr tion of gold. The city of Philadelphia, he stated, was underlaid by a of clay having an area of about ten square miles, with an average de of about fifteen feet. Specimens of this clay-all natural deposits-ta from such localities as might furnish a fair assay of the whole-the c of the market on Market Street, near Eleventh, and from a brick-yar the suburbs of the city-all yielded, on careful analysis, small amount gold; the average amount indicated being seven-tenths of a grain about three cents' worth of gold for every cubit foot of clay. Assun these data to be correct, the value of the gold, according to Mr. Eck which lies securely buried underneath the streets and houses of Phila phia must therefore be equivalent to $128,000,000; or if we includ the clay contained in the corporate limits, the amount of gold conta to ing gold, soon learn results of a day's labor thus emuseful or desirable commoditiesn the results of a similar amount ordinary occupations; and not a , as the result of their individual do better for himself in the way ing any and every other occupang for gold.* Accordingly, after he most skilled laborers left the to their old occupations; and by the unskilled laborers in such yet been obtained from California and ckfelt, "that every time a cart-load of iladelphia, enough gold goes with it to cks which front our houses could have n of gold-leaf, the amount of gold which littering show of two square inches on a good able-bodied laborer can earn on entimes per day, washing gold from the ost circumstances he can earn ten sous the banks of the river, and without so gold-washing on the Rhine is not often about that t gold was fou ing, and conti were by instinct or kind of huma And the momen island for the fi dition to the uni er which it had fitted it, above all gr day's labor in other occupations. But as soon as this was served, an additional supply of labor went back to gold-n ing, and continued to follow it, until an equalization of res from effort in gold-digging and effort in other correspond employments was again established, as before related. this interchange of employments and equalization of res from labor went on, year by year, until at last the people, a were by instinct, found out that a given quantity of gold resented more permanently a given amount of a certain or kind of human labor or effort than any other one substa And the moment this fact became apparent, the people on island for the first time also clearly perceived that gold, in dition to the universal exchanging quality or purchasing p er which it had before naturally acquired, from the circ stance that every body from the time of its first discov wanted it, had further acquired two other attributes, wh fitted it, above all things else, to serve as money; namely, first, that it had become a measure or standard of value, which, as by a yard-stick, the comparative value of all of commodities might be measured or estimated; and, seco that its value or purchasing power was so constant and con uously inherent in itself, even under circumstances when value of most other commodities would be destroyed, that lest what little they saved should worthless by keeping, before the lly need it to pay for doctors and cent burial. The cowry money, heir hard toil and personal depriping, to be only worthless shells; alueless when it became unfash to be fed every day to keep it discount, and penned up every king off; the wheat money was damp or devoured by vermin; iron had proved too heavy for e store every time they wanted tobacco. But here was somesatisfied the necessities of their o feel certain that, whether they it was always damp and moldy; e it was always hot and smoky; sland among the heathen, or at stians, would always, year in and e average quantity of all sorts offered in payment for servctor, lawyer, merchant, druggist, to the Yankee, Irish, Dutch, the poor old always something fill their old stock shut up by some ed to keep someth wrong the money, they carr it was first foun and the nuggets * "And when the al currency), "what have to be considera will fill her stocking to the extent of rem general paused, glar tling, chewed his ci Reporter's Interview w |