Ron: An excellent dissertation, unlike the tall speaking thall, you know what you are talking about. There are still unanswered questions, however. If the photos were of refined metal prills, the dimension of the gold droplets should be appreciably larger than .5 mm, furthermore, it would include its collector agent or whatever they call it in fire assay (namely the metal in which the "noble one are collected, whether Pb, Ag, Cu or even Hg in the old days). Finally, if one wanted to do an EDX for gold, one would use an electron beam of at least 90 Kev to excite the K (alpha) electrons, since they give the largest signal, and not just the 20 Kev which is used mostly for imaging. If there was gold telluride, it would have surely shown the Te peak. Last, the fact that that more than the one peak for gold shows, indicate to me that they have used a higher voltage for the analysis (only the 13 Kev would have shown at 20 Kev excitation), and thus Te surely should have been seen.
So, my conclusion is still, something is fishy. Either the micrograph are not of the ore, they cannot be of the prills, or there is no tellurium. There is however a third possibility (quite rare however, but could be operative here). The gold telluride and native gold are present simultaneously, and this micrograph and spectral data are only of the native gold. I think this is reaching however, that is why one should dig a little further.
Zeev
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