The Shasta Indians never enjoyed a war fully unless they had first smeared their faces with reddish cinnabar (mercury sulfide), which they got from a big deposit in northern California. Last week it appeared that California's mercury mines, and smaller mines in Oregon, Texas, Arkansas, may soon be furnishing European braves with mercury for war: for antifouling paint for battleship bottoms, photographs, batteries, medicine, and especially for mercury fulminate detonators.
The famed Almaden mines in Spain and the Idria mines north of Trieste, Italy, have many times the capacity of all U....
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