Getting Gold | Page 6

grinding between stones. This is also
practised in Africa to-day, and we have seen that the Koreans, with
Mongolian acuteness, have gone a step farther, and pulverise the quartz
by rocking one stone on another. In South America the arrastra is still
used, which is simply the application of horse or mule power to the
stone-grinding process, with use of mercury.
The principal sources of the gold supply of the modern world have
been, first, South America, Transylvania in Europe, Siberia in Asia,
California in North America, and Australia. Africa has always
produced gold from time immemorial.
The later development in the Johannesburg district, Transvaal, which
has absorbed during the last few years so many millions of English
capital, is now, after much difficulty and disappointment--thanks to
British pluck and skill--producing splendidly. The yield for 1896 was
2,281,874 ounces--a yield never before equalled by lode-mining from
one field.
In the year 1847 gold was discovered in California, at Sutor's sawmill,
Sacramento Valley, where, on the water being cut off, yellow specks
and small nuggets were found in the tail race. The enormous "rush"
which followed is a matter of history and the subject of many romances,
though the truth has, in this instance, been stranger than fiction.
The yield of the precious metal in California since that date up to 1888
amounts to 256,000,000 pounds.

Following close on the American discovery came that of Australia, the
credit of which has usually been accorded to Hargraves, a returned
Californian digger, who washed out payable gold at Lewis Ponds Creek,
near Bathurst, in 1851. But there is now no reason to doubt that gold
had previously been discovered in several parts of that great island
continent. It may be news to many that the first gold mine worked in
Australia was opened about twelve miles from Adelaide city, S.A., in
the year 1848. This mine was called the Victoria; several of the
Company's scrip are preserved in the Public Library; but some two
years previous to this a man named Edward Proven had found gold in
the same neighbourhood.
Most Governments nowadays encourage in every possible way the
discovery of gold-fields, and rewards ranging from hundreds to
thousands of pounds are given to successful prospectors of new
auriferous districts. The reward the New South Wales authorities meted
out to a wretched convict, who early in this century had dared to find
gold, was a hundred lashes vigorously laid on to his already excoriated
back. The man then very naturally admitted that the alleged discovery
was a fraud, and that the nugget produced was a melted down brass
candlestick. One would have imagined that even in those unenlightened
days it would not have been difficult to have found a scientist
sufficiently well informed to put a little nitric acid on the supposed
nugget, and so determine whether it was the genuine article, without
skinning a live man first to ascertain. My belief is that the unfortunate
fellow really found gold, but, as Mr. Deas Thompson, the then Colonial
Secretary, afterwards told Hargraves in discouraging his reported
discovery, "You must remember that as soon as Australia becomes
known as a gold-producing country it is utterly spoiled as a receptacle
for convicts."
This, then, was the secret of the unwillingness of the authorities to
encourage the search for gold, and it is after all due to the fact that the
search was ultimately successful beyond all precedent, that Australia
has been for so many years relieved of the curse of convictism, and has
ceased once and for all to be a depot for the scoundrelism of
Britain--"Hurrah for the bright red gold!"

Since the year 1851 to date the value of the gold raised in the
Australasian colonies has realised the enormous amount of nearly
550,000,000 pounds. One cannot help wondering where it all goes.
Mulhall gives the existing money of the world at 2437 million pounds,
of which 846 millions are paper, 801 millions silver, and 790 millions
gold. From 1830 to 1880 the world consumed by melting down plate,
etc., 4230 tons of silver more than it mined. From 1800 to 1870 the
value of gold was about 15 1/2 times that of silver. From 1870 to 1880
it was 167 times the value of silver and now exceeds it over twenty
times. In 1700 the world had 301 million pounds of money; in 1800,
568 million pounds; and in 1860, 1180 million pounds sterling.
The gold first worked for in Australia, as in other places, was of course
alluvial, by which is usually understood loose gold in nuggets, specks,
and dust, lying in drifts which were once the beds of long extinct
streams and rivers, or possibly the moraines of glaciers, as in New
Zealand.
Further on the differences will be mentioned between "alluvial"