The
value of the silver produced in the world in 1920 was $177,592,400, and
the total value from 1860 to 1920, inclusive, was $5,978,119,200.
Most
of the world's output of silver is produced or refined in the United
States, but a large part of it is consumed in Great Britain, India, and
China, and the price of silver has been dominated by the London market.
"Silver, its romance and history," by Benjamin White, contains
information relating to the buying and selling of silver and the fixing
of the market quotations, which was quoted in the chapter on gold and
silver in Mineral Resources for 1918.
MINES REPORT.
METHOD OF COLLECTING STATISTICS.
The
first table below presents the final official figures of the
production of gold and silver in the United States in 1920 as agreed
upon by the Bureau of the Mint and the United States Geological Survey.
With the comparatively unimportant exceptions of domestic gold and
silver contained in ores and mattes exported for reduction during the
year, these figures record the actual production of gold and silver
bullion from domestic ores in marketable form as metals, either refined
or unrefined.
Owing
to the difficulty of tracing this total gold and silver produced back
to its source by States, counties, and mining districts, however, the
Geological Survey attacks this problem of distribution by systematic
investigation of the "mine production" of ores containing gold and
silver during the calendar year and of the output of the placer mines.
In this way the state of the mining industry is studied in detail, and
the output is classified by methods of production and by kinds of ore,
as well as by mining districts. The resulting figures form the basis of
the mines reports.
