11x – A piece of theoretically clean silver was placed on plaster table and melted with a hand-held propane torch.
The melted silver quickly formed a bead and produced the yellow sublimate suggesting Bismuth, and although sprouts formed an eyeball scrutiny could find no obvious contamination. Some old/newer books claim that silver sprouting is due to impurities or high purity. I don’t claim to know, but I am fairly sure that these types of sprouts are due to cooling too quickly.

10x – Ag
Fairly clean Ag that was originally 999 silver that I ran through a couple chemical digestions, filtrations and reductions, but still has some bismuth and lead, plus a bunch of trace elements.

25x – magnified view of preceding image focused upon the thousands of tiny beads spit off the main body of the silver due to high heat.

50x – impure silver.
Notice the glassy colored slag erupting from the silver after being exposed to 5000+ degrees F for about 15 seconds. As usual there are the typical tiny beads of silver spit-off from the original piece of silver.

20x – a fairly pure bead of Ag.
Note the crystalline surface. There is some contamination that is bismuth, which almost all the so-called 999 or 9999 silver I have used contains some amount of and is very difficult to get rid of.

40x – this silver bead is pretty clean, but there are still trace elements present, including Bismuth.
The crystalline pattern is typical of silver when melted at 5000+f.