Canton P. Willis, age 7, of Fort Devens, Mass., for his question:

Who discovered gold?

The story of gold goes back to the beginning of history. We know that people have treasured it for 5,000 years and maybe longer. In the past them were many countries that treasured gold, just as they do today.

Gold was discovered in California 1848, and this started the Gold Rush. Thousands of people rushed to California from faraway places. some of them found flakes and nuggets of precious gold and some got gold from mines in the ground. These lucky ones became rich  for in those days gold was just about the most precious thing a person could own. Nowadays other things are more costly than gold.

This was not the first time gold was discovered Spanish soldiers followed Columbus to the New World and went searching for it. They found lots of it in Central America and in South America. Two years after gold was discovered in California, more was found in Australia. In the next few years, more gold was discovered in Canada and New Zealand, India and South Africa, and in l897, which was 69 years ago, gold was discovered in Alaska.

But none of these was the first discovery of gold. In Greece and India, in Spain and Russia people had been mining gold for ages  and no one knows for sure when these gold mines were discovered. Many gold mines in the Old World were discovered and started way back in history, for gold was always precious and valuable and always there were people who went searching for it.

Maybe our cavemen ancestors found nuggets of gold on the ground and treasured them. These nuggets would be rough and bumpy chunks of dull yellow. To look its best, gold must be smelted or melted and purified and shaped into graceful objects: People could not do this until they learned how to smelt metals in hot furnaces. In the Bronze Age, they smelted bronze from copper and tin. And at this time, some of the ancient lands began smelting gold. Perhaps the Egyptians were the first to do this. We know that they mined and washed gold and made golden ornaments 5,000 years ago. They left pictures of how they did it.

We know a lot about the story of gold  but no one knows who discovered it first. No one knows where or when the first gold was found.

There is not much gold in all the world, and it is valuable because it is beautiful and hard to find. Here and there we find lumpy nuggets on or in the ground. There are fragments and flakes of gold in certain streams  but most of it is mixed with other rocky minerals of the earth's cruet. These rich rocks are ores, which must be crushed and washed, rinsed and purified to give up their fragments of precious gold.