The alluvium over an area of about 50 square miles around Lead-hills in Lanarkshire, is auriferous. In many places the precious metal may be rendered visible after fifteen or twenty minutes washing with the primitive wooden trough employed by the local gold-seekers. Frequently nuggets have been found weighing from one to four or five pennyweights, and these are often either contained in pieces of loose quartz, or have quartz fragments attached to them; there are therefore good reasons to believe that the gold found in the red stratum of clay lying immediately above the rock has been derived from the numerous quartz veins which traverse the district.
The author was one day searching, along with some friends, for gold quartz in situ, and while examining a vein which crosses a gulch in the hills, called the “Gold Scars,” found cavities in the quartz filled with a peculiar pasty substance, which appeared at first sight like minute scales of silver, which had been precipitated from a solution. Our first impression was that it was silver, but its behaviour in water soon cleared away the delusion; it rendered the water exceedingly turbid and white, and the suspended matter was a long time in settling.
Geochemistry of Umm Rus gold - quartz veins, Central Eastern Desert Egypt. A new contribution