the poets invented the " golden fleece " of the Colchians. In like manner,
it can be contrived by the methods of miners that skins should take up, not
only particles of gold, but also of silver and gems.
"Colchis, the traditional land of the Golden Fleece, lay between the Caucasus on the
north, Armenia on the south, and the Black Sea on the west. If Agricola's account of the
metallurgical purpose of the fleece is correct, then Jason must have had real cause for complaint as to the tangible results of his expedition. The fact that we hear nothing of the
fleece after the day it was taken from the dragon would thus support Agricola's theory. Tons
of ink have been expended during the past thirty centuries in explanations of what the fleece
really was. These explanations range through the supernatural and metallurgical, but more
recent writers have endeavoured to construct the journey of the Argonauts into an epic of the
development of the Greek trade in gold with the Euxine. We will not attempt to traverse
them from a metallurgical point of view further than to maintain that Agricola's explanation
is as probable and equally as ingenious as any other, although Strabo (xi, 2, 19.) gives much
the same view long before.
Alluvial mining—gold washing—being as old as the first glimmer of civilisation,
it is referred to, directly or indirectly, by a great majority of ancient writers, poets, historians,
geographers, and naturalists. Early Egyptian inscriptions often refer to this industry,
but from the point of view of technical methods the description by Pliny is practically
the only one of interest, and in Pliny's chapter on the subject, alluvial is badly con-
