This edited article about gold originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 827 published on 19 November 1977.

Gold fever! In the 19th century, it could sweep whole continents like a raging fire. America, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Canada each had their own gold rush, or rushes.

The pattern kept repeating itself. There would be a rumour of a gold “strike”, then a stampede to the area would begin. Office boys in London and New York headed for the ports: good men and bad men set out for the gold-fields. Many never arrived; many more never found gold; a few discovered unimaginable wealth – in places with names like Bonanza Creek and Last Chance Gulch.

Some of those who had been in the Californian Gold Rush of 1849 in their teens were to be found heading for the Klondike in 1898. Such was gold fever.

Two things made the 19th century the greatest age of gold-mining – the sheer size of the finds, and the fact that travel by sea and later by rail became available to everyone.

Even so, toiling in the gold-fields was a hard way of making a fortune.

We have selected three of the best pictures from our large collection of 19th and early 20th century educational trade cards.
The first picture shows Jason making a sacrifice to the Gods to aid the Argo in its voyage.

Sacrifice to the Gods to aid the Argo in its voyage

The second picture shows gold prospectors in Alaska.

Gold prospectors, Alaska

The third picture shows St James the Great, patron saint of Spain.

St James the Great, patron saint of Spain

High-resolution scans of all educational cards can be found in the Look and Learn picture library.

We have selected three of the best pictures from our large collection of 19th and early 20th century educational trade cards.
The first picture shows Frigg accompanied by the Valkyries.

Frigg accompanied by the Valkyries

The second picture shows Mozart playing the piano at the age of three.

Mozart Plays the Piano at the Age of Three

The third picture shows the Wieliczka salt mine, Poland.

Wieliczka salt mine, Poland

High-resolution scans of all educational cards can be found in the Look and Learn picture library.

This edited article about the language of the Bible originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 376 published on 29 March 1969.

Prehistoric salt trading colony, Hallstadt, Upper Austria

If there is too much salt in our food, it will make us thirsty. And many sailors believe that if they were shipwrecked they should not drink sea-water for fear of it driving them mad with thirst.

So to refer to someone whom we greatly admire as “the salt of the earth” may not seem much of a compliment. Yet the words are often heard. Supposing you were watching a lifeboat putting out to sea in rough weather to help a ship in distress; you might hear someone in the admiring but anxious crowd of onlookers say: “Wonderful men, those! They are the salt of the earth!”

Salt is, in fact, much more valuable than most of us realise. Without sufficient salt in our diet we become ill, so vital is it to the health of human beings. Salt is also an essential part of most animals’ diets, and many country cow-sheds have a “salt lick” by each stall.

We learn about common salt in chemistry lessons. This substance is indeed so cheap and so widely available as to deserve the description “common”.

But in some countries even today, and formerly in many others, salt is anything but common. On the contrary, it is rare and expensive. I remember seeing large blocks of salt being carefully weighed at a market in a remote part of Africa. They were being used in payment for other goods instead of money.

If that seems strange, think of our saying that a person who works really hard is “worth his salt”. This is a saying that goes back a very long way, to the days of the Romans, who received part of their wages in salt (“salary” means “salt-money”); and to the days of sailing ships, when, especially on long voyages, a ration of salt was an essential part of a sailor’s wages! Many old sea stories also remind us of the days when food could not be sealed in cans or kept in refrigerators and had to be preserved in salt, either dry, or in a solution of “brine”. Today, in many parts of the country, people still pack beans and other vegetables between layers of salt, as a way of storing them for winter use. So perhaps we should think of salt more gratefully than we sometimes do, especially when we realise how essential it is yet how scarce it can sometimes be.

In the time of Jesus Christ, salt was highly prized because it was the only known means of preserving food. Jesus spoke of his chosen followers, the disciples, as “the salt of the earth” (Matthew, chapter 5, verse 13), meaning that they could do among their fellows many of the useful and necessary things that salt did in their homes. But he added a warning that salt which had lost its flavour and strength was only fit to be thrown away. This was a warning to all who follow him to maintain the true worth and flavour of their faith.

This edited article about mini-submarines originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 761 published on 14th August 1975.

The Vickers mini-sub by Wilf Hardy

It was a routine job. Pisces III, a tiny submarine with just enough room for its crew of two, was working on the sea bed at a depth of about half a mile.

Pisces was burying a newly laid transatlantic cable. Its manipulator arms held a nozzle which directed a powerful jet of water that cut a trench in the sea bed.

When the trench was formed, the cable sank into it. In time, it would be filled in with seabed material.

Eight hours passed. Then the two pilots in Pisces III brought their craft to the surface to the mother ship, Vickers Voyager.

As the Voyager began winching in the sub, waves lashed at the towline, which was momentarily slack. They snaked it around the hatch lock of the sub’s rear buoyancy sphere, pulling off the hatch cover.

More than a ton of water cascaded into the sphere. Its weight snapped the towline, and Pisces III dived into the depths, hitting the bottom at 1,575 ft. (about 470 metres).

This happened on 29th August, 1973, when Pisces was operating some 150 miles (240 km) off Cork, Ireland, and for 76 hours the two pilots crouched in their little craft, becoming progressively weakened by their diminishing oxygen supply.

This edited article about the Dead Sea originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 725 published on 6 December 1975.

The Dead Sea

From the city of Jerusalem eastward to the north shore of the Dead Sea is a mere 15 miles (24km). Yet it is like a journey to a different planet. At the point where the River Jordan makes its way through its Delta into the sea, the visitor is confronted with one of the most awe-inspiring landscapes in the world.

Northward the river winds its way down its age-old valley; to the west are the hills and mountains of Judea, while eastward rises the steep, forbidding face of the Jordanian highlands. And stretching away to fill the southern end of the Jordan valley is that strange, almost sinister, stretch of water known as the Dead Sea.

The surface of the sea, with its varying shades of intense blue, is often shrouded in mists as its still waters evaporate in the stifling heat. Swiftly changing patterns of light play upon cliffs and outcrops, reflected in the rich reds and other colours of the rock. The shores glitter as if with frost or snow; but it is with salt crystals, not ice crystals, that they are covered.

Travellers descending to the Dead Sea from the highlands are conscious of a sense of oppression. In their eardrums they may even sense the same painful sensations we feel in an aircraft when it rapidly changes altitude.

This is hardly surprising, for at its surface the Dead Sea is about 1290 ft (393 m) below the level of the Mediterranean Sea; and its bed, at its deepest, is another 1300 ft (396 m) down. It is the lowest lying sea, or lake, on the surface of the Earth.

This edited article about vitamins originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 690 published on 5 April 1975.

A poster from the 1940s promoting healthy food consumption

Doctors were puzzled. In Britain’s smoky industrial cities, children were suffering from a disease which made them very ill and left them with bent bones.

But in the fishing ports, the youngsters seemed miraculously free from this ailment. What was the reason? In time, the doctors found the answer.

The fishermen’s children were eating bread dipped in fish oil, and it was the oil which was keeping them free from the dreadful illness, called rickets, which was spoiling the health of the city children.

Rickets is caused by a lack of calcium which is necessary for the building of strong bones. This cannot be obtained unless there is vitamin D in our food. Fish oil is rich in vitamin D, and that is why the fishermen’s children who ate it were fit and the city children, who were denied it, were sickly.

If we eat a balanced diet, we will get all the things we need to be healthy, including all the substances called vitamins, from the Latin word vita for “life”. They are tiny chemical compounds and were discovered in 1911 by Casimir Funk, a Polish scientist.

This edited article about the sea originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 689 published on 29 March 1975.

Waves crashing on the seafront by Clive Uptton

Most of us think that the sea consists entirely of water. But in every hundred pounds weight of sea water there are about three and a half pounds of solid materials. Most of them are salts of one kind or another.

If all the salts could be taken out of all the world’s oceans and spread over the continents, they would form a crust several feet thick.

Another surprising thing is that sodium chloride, which is the chemists’ name for the salt we sprinkle on our food, makes up only three-quarters of the salts dissolved in sea water.

This edited article about dust originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 684 published on 22 February 1975.

Brick dust seller in Portman Square; it was used for cleaning knives and cost a penny a quart

Most of us think of dust as just dirt that has to be swept up in the house or as something that gets into your eyes on a windy day.

But dust is much more than gritty dirt or an irritating speck in the eye. It is one of the most important things in our lives. It can do us good and it can do us harm.

Without dust, we would have no food, because the shape and size of dust particles making up soil decide whether or not crops will grow. This is because particles of earth, which are really dust, can hold, on their surface, a lot of moisture, heat and air. Without these three things, plants could not grow.

The dust particles in the earth attract specks of the minerals that plants need. The moisture on the dust then dissolves the minerals to feed the plant roots.

This edited article about Barney Barnato originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 676 published on 28 December 1974.

Barney Barnato realised he had walked all the way to Kimberley

Everyone knew there were diamonds in South Africa. Not just ordinary diamonds, but massive gems that were just waiting to be picked up like pebbles from a beach. Men had made themselves rich for life in just half an hour. Wilder and wilder grew the stories from the diggings and soon every ship that arrived at Port Elizabeth and Cape Town was packed with prospectors eager to lay their hands on any sort of transport that would carry them the 600 miles to the get-rich-quick township of Kimberley.

It cost £40 to hire a coach that would cover the distance in comfort, £12 for a place on a bone-shaking ox wagon. But so far as 20-year-old Barney Barnato was concerned, both were hopelessly beyond his means. He had landed in South Africa in the summer of 1873 with barely enough money for food, let alone transport, yet he wandered up and down the sand-covered streets with cheerful optimism. The son of a poor Jewish family that had scraped up a living buying and selling old clothes off London’s Commercial Road, he was used to bargaining. Sooner or later he’d find someone who’d come down to his price.

Finally he succeeded.

“Ja. I take you for five pounds.” The Boer wagon driver studied his customer with amusement, seeing a youngster who was only five feet three inches tall, with golden hair and wearing small, wire framed spectacles. Then he added hastily, “But your food you find yourself. Also I have only six oxen, and they are old. So when there is bad going you walk, yes?”

“That’s all right. So long as you show me the way.”

It was an agreement, and Barney Barnato stuck to it. Even though, when he finally arrived at Kimberley two months later, he realised it had been bad going all the way and he had walked the whole six hundred miles.