A HISTORY OF THE PRECIOUS METALS FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE PRESENT. BY ALEXANDER DEL MAR, M.E. Formerly Director of the Bureau of Statistics of the United States; Member of the LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN. 1880. (The right of translation is reserved.) THE PREFACE. HE fact that half a century has elapsed since the preparation of Mr. William Jacob's "History of the Precious Metals," and that, although the interval has been replete with important events relating to the subject—such as the discovery of the great Californian and Australian placers, the opening of highly-productive mines in Nevada, the extension of the European system of money to Japan and other countries-no book has been published which attempts to cover the same ground, will be regarded, it is hoped, as a sufficient apology for the present essay. Nevertheless, there are other reasons to urge in behalf of its appearance. Mr. Jacob's work, our single comprehensive source of information on the subject, is not only antiquated, but defective. It fails to mark the significant agency of conquest and slavery in the production of gold and silver; it is vitiated throughout by unsafe calculations of the world's stock of these metals in ancient and medieval times; it affords no information of the very considerable movement from Japan to Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; it scarcely mentions, and thus underrates, the importance of the Brazilian placers which have yielded to the world nearly two hundred million pounds sterling of gold; it contains no connected history, indeed but little mention, of the ratio of value between gold and silver; and it omits all reference to the devastation of the earth, and the social mischiefs entailed upon mining countries by the search for these metals. In spite of these defects, the industry and care which Mr. Jacob devoted to the examination of the more ancient historical data relating to the precious metals have not only brought the present writer greatly into his debt; they must b |