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Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa Author:Mungo Park, James Rennell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: eHAP. XXIII. Of Gold Dust, and the mnnner in which it is collected—Of Ivory—Mode of Hunting the Elephant. Gold is found in small grains through every part ... more »of Manding, as well as in other districts of the interior of Africa, but it never occurs in veins, imbedded in quantities of'sand or clay. The grains are about the size of peas. Those vho please themselves by extending a few particular facts into an universal law of nature, have sometimes assured us, that gold is not found any where but in mountainous and barren regions. Nor are they without what they consider a reason tor this circumstance; nature, in their opinion, having refused other commodities to the regions in which it has placed so precious a metal. But though gold be precious in the sight of an European, or Asiatic merchant, or rather in the sight of any merchant, it is not necessarily precious in the sight of nature. Such tribes as are still in a state rf na ture, and have no knowledge except what she can furnish, place gold in a very inferior department of their scale of excellence. The natives of the South-Sea islands, reckon the common necessaries of life, and even iron itself, much more valuable than gold. Nature, in the establishment of its laws, could not have regard to a maxim far from being universally true. In that part of Africa which Mr. Park visited, gold is found in many districts; and though these be in general hilly, yet they are neither mountainous nor barren. The hills are scarcely more than small eminences; the country every where produces the necessaries of life in abundance ; and it is capable of being made to produce them still more plentifully. The districts in this part of Africa where gold is produced most abundantly, are Manding, and the territory named Jallonkadoo. Mr. Park was inf...« less