OK Keith, as you say, time to draw a line (although I have found four definitions
of the word gangue on-line which all confirm that it is that part of the material
sent in the crude ore to the mineral dressing process which needs to be discarded -
i.e. it has come out of the mine).
That said, I wonder if there might be something in regional usage behind this?
Herbert Hoover, in describing his efforts with his wife Lou Henry to translate the
medieval Latin of Georgius Agricola in De Re Metalica, found that the only words
in the English language which provided an exact description of some of the 1550s
activities Agricola was talking about were to be found in the dialect of Derbyshire
lead miners, not in the normal English dictionaries.
Could the usage of "gangue" in the sense of waste disposed of underground, which
has not been subjected to mineral processing, be a regional thing? In some mines,
were there gangs of men breaking rock underground in order to liberate the valuable
mineral from the waste, and the latter then stowed underground, and called gangue?
In that case, were they not carrying out the initial stages of "mineral dressing" below
ground?
I am preparing a PowePoint program to back up a talk to a local Science group of the
University of the Third Age which I am calling "Copper through the Ages" and a photo
I have found of men at work underground at Dolcoath shows numerous men, many with
hammers, who might well have been doing just that, no doubt to reduce the amount of
material needing to be hoisted and put through the stamps, and also to provide some
backfill material readily available underground.
So, maybe we have common ground after all??!!
Cheers,
Tony Brewis
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