THE GENERAL DIFFUSION OF GOLD.

Tuapeka Times, Volume III, Issue 207, 18 January 1872, Page 7

THE GENERAL DIFFUSION OF GOLD.

The following extract is from the Sydney "Herald" of October 6th. Tho facts which it so clearly states are as applicable to New Zealand as to New South Wales :—

The business of mining has set in, and men of capital are settling down seriously to pound away at the reefs. It is somewhat unfortunate that these reefing operations have fallen into the hands of speculators who have been characterised more by a desire for gold than skill to extract it. Their failures have thrown an amount of discredit upon the enterprise it does not deserve, and will, of course, survive ; for instances of success are not wanting to prove that, for those who conduct their affairs with spirit and intelligence, great profit is in store.

There is a moral purpose, it may be inferred, in the general diffusion of such a valuable metal as gold, for, next to iron, it is the most widely diffused metal on the face of the earth. It occurs in granite, the oldest rock known to us, and in all the' rocks derived from it. It is also found in the veinstones which traverse other geological formations.

It is met with in the beds of tbe beds of the present rivers from the granite-gathering grounds, and rocks tluit have been changed by the action of fire. It is found also in the old beds over which these rivers have pursued their way in their passage through wide valleys as they shifted their course from side to side. The miner now seeks it it the beds of ancient rivers, long ago lost to sight under superincumbent formations. But beyoud these situations in which it can be discovered by the eye, there are others only apparent to the chemist. The Eev. W. B. Clarke, Mr. Selwyn, Mr. Daintree, and some others, say the presence of gold may be looked for in the secondary and tertiary formations ; that is to say in formations very much younger than those which are often considered to be typical. Thus gold has been derived from pyrites in greenstone ; in slate altered and indurated by heat, as seen at (xympie; in coal shale, as in Victoria, where Mr. iSelwyn procured as much as six and a-half pennyweights per ton from pyrites in such shale, and as Mr. Daintree has shown from the desert sandstone of Queensland. The chemist may yet further aid in the discovery of invisible sources of auriferous wealth ; and while he is co-oper-ating with the miner to give the world the treasures of the earth, Nature is silently at work replenishing the store by depositing gold from decomposing rocks of all ages, and forming it, as

Mr. Clarke thinks, by precipitation from mineral waters holding its solution.

Our share of tho gold scattered through the world, and found either m the matrix or out of it, visible or invisible, is fortunately large. We stand upon a possession that cannot be taken away — a possession that should afford us hope and confidence with regard to the future. Mr. Clarke informs us, and indeed we can now perceive by the maps, chiefly due to his investigations, that gold is known to exist, in less or greater abundance, throughout an ai'ea of which the limits are, both of longitude and latitude, nearly nine degrees asunder, which, as he truly observes, is a sufficiently extensive region to offer expectation of many further developments of tho precious metal.