GOLD EXTRACTION TO-DAY.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 421, 20 November 1889, Page 2

GOLD EXTRACTION TO-DAY.

Thus a San Francisco paper : Gold-mining is in many minds still associate with a (1 innel-shirted, long-booted, gambling class of doubtful manners, who with pick, shovel, and pan, found foitune in the hill streams of the Fa>- West or of the land of (he kanguioo. But this race of niineis i> npidl}' becoming as extinct as the redskin of California or the black boy of Australia. As the superficial deposits which attiact the pioneeis wore exhausted, the aid of 1 machinery and science became essential ; and a new order of things began, introducing the capitalist, the eh -mist, and the engineer. Moreover, in th«*ir h iste to got rich, and with th»ir vough-und ready appliances, the early digger* 1 only woiked the richest ftn vllliri {infl passed over tons — acies — of stuff which, with modem methods, would pay handsomely To convey an idea of the perfection which has been attended by some of the process^ of to-day, one illustration \\ ill *-ufTi« < o, During a quarter's (tluvo months) woikiug lust year of the rlluvial deposit ol" Dayltsfoid, Victoria, some 33,660 tons of gravel were rjateil, and gave an average yield of 13+ur. tioy of gold from each ton of snivel. r l hat is to say of all this enormous mass of material dug up, passed through the nparatus and redeposited, only one eighteen hundred and fourteenth part was of value; the other 1813 paits being useles*. In other words, suppose an acre of land 15l"t deep to be turned over, broken up to ihe most minute propoitions, and bodily removed in oider that it might be made to yield up a hidden treasure in the foim of line dust, the whole of which could be easily hold in a small coal scuttle. And this was accomplished presumably at a cost which left a reasonable margin of profit These results are altogether unparalleled in any other kind of metal mining. As a i tile, the metal or its ore forms the bulk of the mass treated. Tims iron often constitutes 75 per cent of the mineral, lead 85 to 87 per cent, copper 78 to 98 per cent, and silver 85 to 99 per cent ; while the gold in the case quoted only amounted to .000118 or a little over one ten thousandth part of 1 per cent.