USES.

The uses of the metal in antimonial lead, which were given in a former paragraph, form the chief modes of consumption.

Antimony is also used as an adulterant in solder and is considered. a very objectionable element, especially when the solder is to be used for sealing cans holding provisions. Some antimony compounds are very poisonous, especially the organic compounds. The use of antimony salts and oxides is comparatively large, as shown by the importations. Antimony trioxide is used as a pigment in place of white lead, zinc oxide, etc., and seems to be gaining ground, especially in Europe. The trioxide is also used for making the glass used to coat iron in enameled ware, as a reducing agent in chemical work, and as a detector of alkaloids and phenols. Antimony arsenate, arsenite, trichloride, iodide, trioxide, trisulphide, pentasulphide, tartrate, and antimony and potassium tartrate are used in medicine. The trichloride, also called antimony butter, is used in bronzing iron, especially gun barrels, as a mordant for patent leather, in coloring zinc black, as a mordant for silver, and in the manufacture of lakes, particularly from dyewoods..

The double salts, antimony fluoride and ammonium sulphide, antimony and potassium oxalate, and antimony and potassium tartrate (tartar emetic) are used in dyeing.

The trisulphide is used in pyrotechnics for making "Bengal fire;" the pentasulphide, or golden sulphide, in coloring rubber goods; the antimonate in coloring glass yellow; vitreous antimony sulphide made by roasting antimony sulphide, then fusing the product with fresh antimony sulphide is also used to tint glass yellow, and for a like purpose with porcelain." The chromate, under the name of "Naples yellow," is used as a fine artist's color. Naples yellow and some of the oxides are used as ceramic colors.

Antimony in the form of metal and oxide is used in making flint glass. About 11 pounds of each per ton of "batch" is used.

a Merck's Index 1907 has been freely quoted as to uses of antimony oxides and salts.

BISMUTH.

By FRANK L. HESS.

The United States has been a small producer of bismuth ores, and until the last two years these ores have been shipped abroad for reduction. The value of the imported bismuth and bismuth compounds has amounted to very much more than that of the ores exported.

The reduction of bismuth ores does not appear to be extraordinarily difficult, but the output of ore in this country has been so small that the large smelters have not cared to take hold of the matter and others did not feel that experimenting and the cost of a plant would be profitable. At some of the smelters a large quantity of bismuth has been wasted in fumes and flue dusts, and at others bismuth has been carried in the lead output and thus lost.

Harkins and Swain have estimated that 880 pounds of bismuth per day are being thrown off in the smoke" at the great Washoe smelter, Anaconda, Mont. This bismuth is undoubtedly not worth saving unless the company owning the smelter should find it expedient to save the flue dusts and fumes and work them over for the copper, lead, zinc, arsenic (part of which is now being saved), and other mineral products which are lost each day and which make an enormous aggregate. To do this does not now seem practicable, but the circumstance is mentioned to show one large potential source of the metal. The electrolytic process of refining lead has made the saving of bismuth carried in pig lead possible, and the United States Metals Refining Company, in 1906, erected a plant at Grasselli, Ind., where the Betts process is used to refine lead bullion from the company's smelter at Bingham Junction, near Salt Lake City. Most of the lead ores carrying bismuth come from the Tintic district, but the company buys gold and other ores carrying bismuth from other districts and States. A comparatively small quantity of bismuth was produced in 1908, but production was started on a much larger scale in 1909. The output is in the form of metal. The same company makes some bismuth at its copper refinery at Chrome, N. J., where the bismuth is recovered from the anode slimes formed in the electrolytic refining of copper.

The Monsanto Chemical Company, of St. Louis, Mo., also put in an electrolytic plant about the same time that the Grasselli plant was erected. The Monsanto Company recovered bismuth from lead bullion from the State of Sinaloa, Mexico, and a considerable recovery has been made, but the plant was closed during 1908.

George E. Stone, Engle, N. Mex., reports having mined bismuth ore from claims on the east side of the San Andreas Mountains, 4 miles north of the Dona Ana County line. The ore is made up of carbonates colored with copper and accompanied by some scheelite.

@Jour. Am. Chem. Soc., vol. 29, 1907, p. 994.

Practically all of the gold ores mined at Goldfield, Nev., carry bismuth, partly in the form of bismuthinite, and though not rich enough to work as bismuth ores they would much enrich such bismuthbearing lead bullion as that produced in Utah by the United States Metals Refining Company.

The domestic production of bismuth in 1908 can not be disclosed. Bolivia is a large producer of bismuth ores, but no figures upon the exports of bismuth ores since 1906 are obtainable. During that year bismuth to the value of $722,978 was exported. It seems probable that somewhat over 200 metric tons of bismuth ore per year are shipped from Bolivia. Other countries that are either actual or possible producers of bismuth are Bohemia, Mexico, New South Wales, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Queensland, Saxony, Spain, and Tasmania.

Imports. The imports of metallic bismuth for the last five years have been as follows:

Imports for consumption of metallic bismuth into the United States, 1904–1908, inclusive, in pounds.

Prices. The price of bismuth during 1908, according to the Mining World, was $1.75 per pound, and of the subnitrate, according to the Engineering and Mining Journal, $1.50. These prices are currently reported to be fixed by Johnson, Matthey & Co., of London, who, by a trade agreement between foreign bismuth refiners, control the trade in France, England, and the United States. At the time the last previous bismuth report was issued by the United States Geological Survey (for 1906) the price for the metal had been put down to $1.25 per pound in order, it was believed, to extinguish competition that had started up. Supposedly, when this had been accomplished, in the middle of 1907, the price was put up to the figure mentioned for 1908, and has remained there since.

Uses. Metallic bismuth is used in low-fusing alloys or cliche metals, which are used in the automatic sprinklers common in large stores, warehouses, etc., and in solders, some of which it is said to be possible to use under hot water which has been acidulated with hydrochloric acid. Some fuses for electrical wiring contain bismuth. A British patent (No. 23586, Dec. 24, 1900) uses the following formula: Bismuth, 50 parts (by weight); cadmium, 15 parts; lead, 20 parts; tin, 21 parts. The metal is used to a small extent in making optical glass. Several of the salts are used in face and toilet powders. The following salts, and probably others, are used in medicine: Albuminate, benzoate, borate, citrate, basic dithio salicylate, formic-iodide, lactate, trinitrate, subnitrate, and oxychloride. The chromate is used as an orange-yellow pigment, and the oxychloride as a white pigment. The subnitrate is used in the preparation of reagents for albumen and dextrose and for converting sulphides of arsenic into corresponding acids.

a Sorsby, W. B., Daily Cons. and Trade Repts., April 9, 1907, p. 12.

6 Merck's (1907) Index.

SELENIUM.

By FRANK L. HESS.

Selenium is a rare and little-known element, closely related in many ways to sulphur and tellurium, with both of which it is found in nature.

With the recent great strides in the electro-refining of copper and the constant experiments in the possible uses of the rare elements, selenium is attracting some attention, as, on the one hand, the copper refineries find considerable quantities of the element in their slimes and desire to find a market for it as well as for other by-products, and, on the other hand, its peculiar characteristics incite effort on the part of experimenters to make use of them.

The principal source of selenium is in the anode muds or slimes of the electrolytic copper refineries. The American Smelters Securities plant at Baltimore, Md., the Perth Amboy and the Chrome, N. J., refineries have made more or less selenium, but the market is not yet large enough to take the possible output. The Baltimore and the Chrome refineries get their crude copper from many sources; that handled at Perth Amboy comes almost exclusively from Butte, Mont. Great tonnages of copper are handled at each of the smelters, and the selenium recovered represents only minute traces in the original ores. The peculiarity is presented, however, of this very easily volatilized element clinging to the copper through the high temperatures and oxidizing atmospheres in which the copper ore is treated.

The anode slimes in the copper refineries contain a large percentage, in many cases 50 per cent or more, of gold and silver. The slimes are treated in very large cupellation furnaces, as large as the reverberatory furnaces which a comparatively few years ago were used for copper smelting. Selenium is collected in the flue dusts from this cupellation, and is recovered by processes which differ with the refinery and which are hardly to be considered as more than experimental.

No selenides are known to have been observed in the Butte copper mines, and selenium is not known to have been detected in the ores by chemical analyses; the same remark applies to the other copper camps in the United States.

Selenium has been found in the mattes made from zinc-box precipitates of the Camp Bird mine, Colorado, but is not detected in the ores. The mattes examined carried from 0.99 to 1.5 per cent of selenium.

a Headden, Wm. P., Some mattes formed in melting zinc-box precipitates, their composition, and what it suggests: Proc. Colorado Sci. Soc., Denver, read December 7, 1907, vol. 8, pp. 349-362.