satisfied with a profit of seven or
eight shillings a day.

According to his experience, the place to look for gold is in the
neighbourhood of distinct traces of volcanic action, or in small
streams coming direct from hills of volcanic formation, or rivers fed
by these streams. An abundance of quartz (commonly called spar) is
universally reckoned an indication of the presence of gold; and if
trap-rock is found cropping up amid this quartz, and perforated with
streaks of it, so much the better. Sometimes the solid quartz itself
is pounded, and gold extracted by the aid of quicksilver. When the
gold is found in rivers, or on their banks, prediction is vain:
nothing will do but the actual trial by the wash-pan. But where there
is a bar or sand-bank, the richest deposit will always be on the side
of the bank presented to the descending stream. The metal in such
digging is almost invariably found in small spangles, that appear to
have been granular particles crushed or rolled flat by some enormous
pressure. In California, these spangles were the beginning of the
gold-finding. When the streams and their banks were well searched, the
crowds of adventurers tried, in desperation, what they could do by
digging deep holes in the plains; and there the metal was found in
such different forms as to indicate quite a different process of
deposition. Some of these holes were productive--although it was
severe labour to dig fifteen or eighteen feet through a hard soil
merely as an experiment; and in the course of time the plains were
covered with tents. The influx of adventurers continued; and the old
diggers, dissatisfied with gains that seemed to the new prodigious,
retired further and further back, and began to grope in the terraces
on the sides of volcanic hills, and among the detritus of extinct
craters. Here the harvest was rich, and as the crowning effort of the
gold-passion, unassisted by machinery, they actually in some cases cut
away the sides of the hills! 'My own impression is,' concludes our
informant on this subject, 'that, both in California and Australia,
the chances of individual enterprise, and even of small companies, are
decreasing rapidly; but that when the mines so wrought have ceased to
pay, capital and machinery, directed by science, will receive
profitable employment for ages to come.'

The wash-pan we have mentioned may be of tin, if not required to be
used with quicksilver, otherwise of copper or wood; but of