Sometimes it's easy. Sometimes there's a copper deposit, or a silver or even a gold deposit, right there on the surface of the soil, staring you in the face. If you can see something like that, well, go ahead and dig. Dig even if your deposit is in an inconvenient place - say, on the side of a cliff, on a very tall mountain, or in the middle of a big plateau with no water or people anywhere close.
But most of the time it isn't so easy, and when you go prospecting, there isn't a sure chance of finding anything. In that case, you can fall back on some very human advice: Start digging somewhere that you wouldn't mind staying for a while. You're going to need water, wood (for shelter and also, if you do find something, for your underground structures), and settlements near. Water can be piped in, of course, but if there are no settlements nearby, you'll have trouble keeping your workmen happy and they'll go somewhere else.
So, the recommendation is a forest, or a medium-sized mountain, not too far away from town.
Agricola didn't know about that most ubiquitous of metals in our modern age, aluminum. He gives instructions for extracting compounds that contain aluminum (alum and cimolite, a valued clayey substance), but he never knew there was metal locked up in these compounds. In this case, the reader knows more than the writer did.
No comments:
Post a Comment