C.—9

1896. NEW ZEALAND.

MINING RESERVES, WESTLAND AND NELSON. (REPORT ON THE MINING RESERVES WITHIN THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF WESTLAND AND THE BULLER AND GREY VALLEYS, NELSON.)

Presented to both Houses of the General Assembly by Command of His Excellency.

Mr. H. A. Goedon, F.G.S., Inspecting Engineer, and Mr. A. McKay, F.G.S., Mining Geologist, to the Undee-Seceetaey of Mines, Wellington. Sic, — Mines Department, Wellington, 10th August, 1895. In accordance with the instructions of the Hon. the Minister of Mines we proceeded to the west coast of the Middle Island, for the purpose of making an examination of the areas reserved for gold-mining purposes from the Mikonui to the Arnold Eiver and Lake Brunner, in the Westland County, and throughout the Grey and Buller Valleys, in the Nelson Provincial District. We arrived at Greymouth on the 10th April, and were employed in the work above indicated till the 12th June following. During the two months we were thus engaged, each of the reserves made within the districts mentioned were, with two exceptions, examined more or less carefully as the circumstances at the time, or the importance of mining on the block, admitted of or seemed to require. The exceptions referred to were the examination of block XIL, of the reserves within the Westland district, which both of us had examined with sufficient care on previous occasions; and of block XXX., a small area in the Upper Buller district, lying between the lower course of the Maruia and of the Matakitaki Biver. This embraces part of the valley of Doughboy Creek, within which, as gathered from trustworthy persons, the conditions are exactly those of the lower part of the Matakitaki Valley. Our object was in all cases to ascertain the present state of mining on the blocks; the number of miners engaged, or men engaged in pursuits accessory to mining; the extent of the works executed and machinery placed on the ground for the purposes of mining. In order to guide us in forming an estimate as to the future working on mining reserves— of mining on blocks on which the form of mining was mainly alluvial—we had to regard the past history and present condition of mining on each block ; and the different classes of alluvial workings had to be discriminated, from the fact that some forms of alluvial mining are likely to have more permanence than others; and some, strictly speaking, alluvial deposits, workings in which could not be regarded as alluvial workings in the ordinary sense of the word, had also to be considered apart, they being cement workings, in some cases requiring to be mined from beneath a considerable thickness of superincumbent strata, or, as in others, forming widespread formations of great thickness and considerable age, from the denudation of which have been derived the more modern auriferous gravels that lie along the valley bottoms of the different watercourses, intersecting the area of such older gravel formations. In discriminating thus between alluvial deposits of different ages and diverse conditions with respect to their origin, fluviatile or marine, it necessarily followed that the general geological condition of the whole region, or of distinctive parts of it, had to be considered, and the review necessarily carried us back, in time, not only to the period of the deposit of the earliest and firstformed beds of the coal formation, which are gold-bearing, but also to make the attempt to determine a period anterior to that of the coal formation during which the reefs in the Maitai series were formed, but more especially, because of greater importance, a subsequent period during which the formations containing quartz reefs were disturbed by upheavals and dislocations that renders the following of lode-fissures very often a matter of great difficulty. We had in one or other of these connections also to consider the general tendency of the drift of the alluvial gold-bearing formations, and the probable source from which the gold had come, and thus through knowledge gained by a study of the hysteromorphous deposits to trace the original source of the gold, or to determine whether a particular area or mountain range might reasonably be regarded as containing auriferousvein deposits. I.—C. 9.