REVIEWS URANIUM IN ANCIENT CONGLOMERATES: A REVIEW

The disputes which have raged for many years about the origin of the gold mineralization of the Witwatersrand have been reviewed with renewed vigor in the last decade, since the discovery of commercial uranium in these ores. As is well known, the dose stratigraphical control of the banket ore-bodies has led many geologists to the conclusions that initially the gold and uranium were deposited as alluvial detritus contemporaneously with the quartz pebbles of the mineralized conglomerates, and that later the sediments were modified by metamorphism. A new monograph on these deposits by nine Russian authors, edited by Professor V. N. Kotlyar, inclines towards this traditional view of the genesis of the mineralization, not only for the Witwatersrand deposits but also for the analogous fields of Blind River in Ontario, Serra de Jacobina in Brazil, Paukkajanvaara in Finland, Tarkwa-Abosso in Ghana, and Mounana in Gabon. The Russian work is based entirely upon western literature, of which it presents an admirably full and unbiased account, and it makes no mention of comparable banket deposits in the U.S.S.R. Its endorsement of the modifie