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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VIII, Issue 205, 26 August 1873, Page 4

The number of miners employed in the colony during the year ending 31st Marob, iBBt was 22,335, of which Dumber 3872 are Chinese. Dividing the value of *,;he total quantity of gold exported amoijgst the mean number of miners employed in alluvial and quartz mining, it appears thafc in 1872 the average was, per man, for the year, £77 10s 3*, while for the year 1871 the average per man w^s about £101 16s s±d, abowing a falling off of £24 S3 2£d per head — a result simply deducible from the falling off in the yield of gold. The considerable falling off in the mining population is (thinks the Goldfields Secretary) to be attributed principally to the fact that the very high pri ces of labor of all kinds which have been lately ruling throughout the colony, has attracted from the goldfields, to other more congenial pursuits, a large proportion of the "wages men"— many of wfr.om were never " miners " in the tru3 ccr ise of the term — and whoso chances of Employment during the late stagnation in our great quartz mining field became exceedingly precarious. A graphic account of the effects produced by the disastrous ea rthquake at San Salvador is given by a special correspondent of the New York World:— "Every church in t'ae cit;p," he says, "was thoroughly destroyed.' ' The oldest and stoutest Spanish building 8, with walls as thick as Gibr a i tarj w hich bad withstood the shook of have been fractured out of all U r jB an ,j fom The outer wa n of the M^ reed church I measured, and

found it nearly 4£ feet thick of solid masonry. It had been cracked in two, from end to end. A huge piece of it, weighing many tone, bad been flung nearly nine feet into the road. Of the interior, nothing can give any idea. It was a pudding, a mess, a porridge dry and dusty, of timbers, atones, bricks, mortar, thatcb. By the concurrent testimony of several creditable persons, the final blow was given by the earthquake to this unfortunate city in the shape of a rotary, not an undulatory shock, which for a few seconds set the ground whirling ' nround and around ' like a real whirlpool in the water. As one gentleman described it to me, * I felt the earth no thicker under me, it seemed, than that sheet of letter paper, and I found it impossible to stand up.' It was by this motion, doubtless, that the heavy masses of masonry which lumber up so many places in front of the demolished churches were tossed so far from their bases. In front of the church of San Francisco, on the Plaza, ior instance, the heavy stone pillars into which the iron railings of the enceinte were set were found flung fairly out into the highway. One of them seems to have resisted rather more than the others, and the line of iron railings with which it was connected was consequently twisted like a fan, and now hangs on the edge of the parapet wall, as light seemingly as a fan of feathers."