Notes on Assaying and Metallurgical Laboratory Experiments

Abstract

PROF. LODGE has brought together in this book the notes which have been in use for many vears by the third-year students in assayinc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and part of the notes given to fourth-year students. The book may therefore be taken as representing the teaching given to metallurgical students in America, and forms an interesting-study to those who wish to know something of the much-praised methods in vogue there. Judging from the contents of Prof. Lodge's volume, the methods do not differ much from those in use in this country and in other parts of the world. The assaying of gold and silver ores is dealt with adequately, and there is an interesting though incomplete chapter on the metals of the platinum group, but the rest of the third-year work (the assay of bullion and of copper and tin ores) is scrappy and of little value. The notes for the fourth-year's work would also not be of much help to students. For example, in the section on cleaning mercury, the student is recommended to wash away soluble and light material with a stream of water, and then to “decant off water and add a small piece of potassium cyanide (poison), which ought to clean it nicely.” The author seems to have some misgivings as to whether base metals would really be removed in this way, but the true nature of the problem is nowhere stated, nor are the correct methods of purification described.

Notes on Assaying and Metallurgical Laboratory Experiments.

By Prof. Richard W. Lodge. Pp. viii + 287. (New York: Tohn Wiley and Sons; London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1904.) Price 12s. 6d. net.