Excerpt from The World's Gold, Its Geology, Extraction, and Political Economy In the slow evolution of monetary systems, gold has finally emerged as without dispute the metal best adapted for money in developed commercial countries. "The battle of the standards," waged bitterly within the memory of men still young, has ended with a triumph so complete that there is no longer pretender bold enough to dispute the sovereignty of gold. There may be question whether silver coins are not still preferable in large amounts for use in the undeveloped countries of the Orient, but even in those regions it is generally recognised that the monetary systems of the future must at least be based upon gold as the unit and standard of value. It is significant of this evolution that a book should find a place in this scientific series which treats distinctively of gold as the money metal of civilised nations. It is a well-known fact that much of the gold which is now being poured into the monetary systems of the world could never have been extracted from the earth with profit under the old methods of production. Long ago, the alluvial deposits which made the fortunes of the Californian "forty-niners" and of the pioneers in Australia were to a large degree exhausted. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.