Our labours, however are not over. Distant rather more than an English mile from Himmelsfürst are the extensive amalgamation works, the smelting furnaces and refining ovens. Painfully fatigued as we are, we cannot resist the temptation of paying them a brief visit. The road is dusty and desolate; nor are the works themselves either striking or attractive. An irregular mass of sheds, brick buildings, and tall chimneys, present themselves. As we approach them we come upon a “sludge hole”—the bed of a stream running from the dredging and jigging works; where, by the agency of water, the ore is relieved of its earthy and other waste matter, and the stream of water—allowed to run off in separate channels—deposits, as it flows, the smaller particles washed away in the first process. These are all carefully collected, and the veriest atom of silver or lead extracted. It is only the coarser ores that undergo this process; the richer deposits being pulverised and smelted with white or charred wood and fluxes, without the application of water, and refined by amalgamation with quicksilver. The two metals are afterwards separated by distilling off the latter.
Here are heaps of scoria—stacks of piglead, wood, coke, limestone and waste earth, everything, indeed, but silver; although we are emphatically in a silver mining district, silver is by no means the material which presents itself in the greatest bulk. Having placed ourselves under the direction of one of the workmen, we are led into some newly built brick buildings, where force-pumps and other water appliances, erected at great cost by the Saxon government, are gratefully pointed out to us. These water-works are equally applicable to the extinction of fire, as to the preparation of ores.
Into what an incomprehensible maze of words should we be betrayed, were we to attempt a description of the multifarious operations for the extraction and refining of metals! Every description of ore, or metalliferous deposit, requires a different treatment: each suggested and verified by laborious experience and vigilant attention. In some cases the pure silver is separated by mechanical means; in others the ore is roasted, in order to throw off the sulphur, arsenic, and other volatile matters, which are separately collected and form no inconsiderable portion of the valuable produce of the mine. These roastings again are smelted with a variety of fluxes, and in different states of purification, until they are ready for refining.