Jesuits in the sixteenth century make references…
1558 CE
Jesuits in the sixteenth century make references to gray, dense pebbles associated with alluvial gold deposits in South America.
The metallic pebbles, which can not be melted alone, alloys with and so adulterates gold that the gold bars become brittle and impossible to refine.
The pebbles become known as platina del Pinto, granules of silvery material—platina being the diminutive of Spanish plata, silver —from the Río Pinto, a tributary of the San Juan River in the Chocó region of Colombia.
Italian humanist, poet, and physician Julius Caesar Scaliger, had alluded in 1557 to a refractory metal, probably platinum, found between Darién and Mexico.
While living in France, Scaliger had become involved in numerous controversies with contemporary men of letters, notably Erasmus and Rabelais.
Following in the tradition of Aristotle and Cicero, he writes an influential Latin treatise on poetics before dying on October 21, 1558, at seventy-four.
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