vaporization:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporization
Evaporation:
Evaporation gases of fluids slowly leave the surface of a liquid, this will happen below the boiling point of that fluid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporation
Boiling
Boiling is where gases decompose at the bottom (from a higher heat than that used in evaporation), the gases decomposing at the bottom of the vessel rise to the surface where they reach the surface, the bubble can pop violently and splash liquids (containing ionic salts of metals) this can splash the metals out of solution, or carry them over when distilling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling
I doubt this was the problem with the gold leach test, I would be more likely to think the leach was just struggling to get any gold ion into solution or keep them there.
I live in a very rich mining area, with many gold mines within walking distance, lots of abandoned hard rock gold mines, that were not mined out, most of the mining stopped not because the mines ran out of gold, but because the price of gold could not pay for the labor or cost to mine the gold, or because during the world war, all miners by law were forced to mine more important metals for the war, even today these mines would cost a fortune to mine, and with all of the government regulations or opposition to mining by environmentalist groups these mines will not be opened to mining any time soon.
you can still get a little free gold at most any of the rivers or creeks around here, a few speck of gold in most every pan, but even then that rarely pays for your time, or equipment (to move enough material),to do any real mining, you have to move and process a lot of rock, anymore it is only done on a very small scale more as a hobby, or recreationally mining, again because of government regulation, the days of mining on large scale, large groups of men or equiptment or large companys mining gold, and pulling millions of dollars worth of gold out of the ground, are just about gone, there are a couple of small mining company's here that are struggling to survive, but even those are being phased out, or shut down, being limited to what they can do.
When the government says you are polluting a river if you pick up gravel from the bottom of the river, and drop that same gravel back down into the river, it makes it hard to mine any gold, with them limiting how much material you can move to get that gold, or what type of equipment, or operation you can use, it puts mining out of business, or makes it impossible to mine on the scale that is needed to make it profitable, it cost a lot of money to process a lot of rock or gravels to get that gold, tons of material need to be moved and processed, to make it worth while.
If we mined like they did in the past young kids would make more money breaking rock for 16 hours a day, but we do not, and these young kids make money working at burger king cooking Hamburgers (probably for more money than they would get for mining gold, and probably doing easier work than they would at breaking rock all day).
Gold is still in them there hills (they may have got most of the easy stuff out of the rivers and creeks), but it takes a lot of equipment or manpower to move enough rock to make it profitable, real mining is large scale operations, and with the government and special interest groups blocking the ability to mine, you are better off working at McDonald's flipping burgers than trying to mine gold for a living.
bmgold2,
Forget about testing Ore, you are just wasting your time.
Spend your time on learning to test metals, learning the value of the metals.
Spend your time mining where the gold or precious metals are around you, learn to test for buy, to determine the value of scrap,learn to buy and sell jewelry and other scrap learn to mine your area (urban mining).
Fix you yourself up a test kit, learn to prepare your own test solutions, and how to use your kit.
Then you can go to town mining for gold.