3

C—lo

It is amazing with what readiness these men acquire knowledge on all subjects relating to gold. Their daily search for gold during many years, and the constant necessity of devising means for meeting the difficulties that arc constantly cropping up, have so sharpened their faculties that they find no difficulty in grasping a new process when fairly explained, and when they themselves are allowed to carry it out for their own advantage. These men, attending the assayingclasses in the blacksmith's forge, assured me —and I could see it in their whole behaviour —that they had never spent a happier time ; and the only regret on their part, as well as my own, was that I could not make a longer stay. So eager were they for the benefits of an annual visit from myself or some other on the teaching staff, that I could not restrain them from subscribing funds and forming a local chemistry-club, or testing-class, although I assured them that, being in the Tuapeka District, they would, without forming a local school, receive their due share of attention at the hands of the Lawrence Athenaeum and Mining Institute. A large number—twenty-five or thirty—of the samples of quartz from the reefs in the Lammerlaw were assayed. The results ranged from nothing up to 50oz. per ton. A large number in which no gold was visible yielded at the rate of from 6dwt. to 2oz. Some blanketing-tailings were assayed, and found to contain gold at the rate of from 50oz. to 201oz. to the ton. The Bluespur miners have always shown a very intelligent interest in these classes. Indeed, it was with them the movement began, nearly three years ago. During my present visit I delivered at the Spur six lectures and conducted testing-classes, at which some of the more advanced men and schoolboys did all the work; and during the day I conducted assays at several of the forges at the different mines. The result of these assaying-classes is, that not only can some of the miners assay pyrites or quartz for gold, but they are now in a position to make their own bone-ash cupels, and purify by cupellation dirty gold, and thereby make it marketable. At the Spur, as at many other centres, there are now a considerable number of grown-up young men and boys, colonial-born, who will be good students of these classes, and profit largely by them. The teachers at Waitahuna, Waitahuna Gully, Wetherstone's, Waipori, and Bluespur, as well as the Eector of the Lawrence High School and several of his assistants, are old students of my own in the University here, and I now find them all co-operating with me most heartily in the work of these classes. During my visit to the Eoxburgh District I left Goodlet at the Teviot to conduct the classes, while I accompanied Mr. Smith —a very successful miner, and member for his district of the Tuapeka County Council—over the Old Man Eange to Campbell's Gully and Potter's, at the head of the Waikaia. With the opening of the Eoxburgh Bridge the Teviot miners will probably form a school of mines in that township. An attempt was made to do so during my last visit. About thirty names were given in as the nucleus of a school, but the difficulty of access to the town—the Molyneux separating it from the main body of miners—was a serious obstacle in the way of united action. From Eoxburgh I sent Goodlet to join Hamann at Eiverton, whilst I myself proceeded to Dunedin to pack chemicals and apparatus for the Eiverton, Orepuki, and Lakes visit. I joined Hamann at Eiverton on the 17th December, and delivered in that district four lectures—one each at Eiverton and Thornbury, and two at Orepuki—and at Eiverton conducted assays on quartz and pyrites which I had collected at the Longwood. At Eiverton, as at so many other places, I was fortunate in having the assistance of one of my own former students in Mr. Golding, first assistant in the Eiverton High School. The wonderful progress in testing and assaying made by some of the schoolboys was a feature of this visit. I never saw in the ordinary schools so much pleasure and so keen an interest taken in any subject as some of these Eiverton boys take in the processes for testing and assaying the metallic ores. So thoroughly were they grounded in this kind, of work by their teacher, Mr. Golding, and Mr. Hamann, that I found it somewhat difficult to puzzle them with fair questions on these subjects so far as they had been taught. The facility with which such boys learn useful facts about the ores ami the chemistry of gold and silver has, I am informed, drawn many adults to the classes who otherwise had no intention of joining, owing to a fancied difficulty in acquiring any practical knowledge of the subject. At Orepuki I had a good attendance on the 24th December, notwithstanding it was Christmas Eve. A school of mines is now being formed there by thirty or forty of the miners, and this, with the Eiverton School, and in view of the still unprospected and little understood Longwood Eange, will require a fair share of the attention of the teaching staff. On the 30th and 31st December I visited the Merivale Diggings. As most of the men were absent keeping holiday I did not lecture, but contented myself with going the round of the diggings with Messrs. Eichardson, McDonald, and a few of the other miners. I was astonished at the amount of work the Merivale miners and prospectors have done in prospecting and testing the country. They have found here and there several reefs mostly small; but up to the time of my visit nothing had been opened of a paying quality, although some of them are of that tantalizing character that makes it dangerous to invest money or spend time and labour on them, whilst at some places they show gold in such a way as to make it appear quite possible that they might be worked profitably. From Merivale I proceeded via Invercargill to the Lakes District, and on the 7th January reached Glenorchy, at the head of Lake Wakatipu. There I met three of the Big Bay prospectors, and to them and a few other miners and a large number of visitors I showed the crucible and cupellation process for assaying gold-bearing stone ; the men themselves, in this as in other cases, doing the whole of the work except the weighing of the button of gold. I proceeded on the Bth to the Pyrites Company's concentrating-plant on the Eees Eiver. This company has been very unfortunate, having erected a magnificent concentration-table and adjuncts, at a cost of probably something like £2,000, to concentrate the pyrites-tailings of the Invincible Mine, and finding, after a short period of prosperity, that not only is there not now enough pyrites in the Invincible stone to make it worth the expense of concentrating, but also that the Invincible Company are so treating their stone and tailings in the battery and berdans that the pyrites is not worth concentrating.