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tage of securing great engineering skill in designing and erecting the plant and machinery. The company itself claims that the plant is the most perfect of its kind in Australasia, and we hardly think this claim is exaggerated. The practice of this company appears to have been to make no distinction between the coals coming from their different mines. The general manager says he prefers to reckon the price at the foot of the incline in each case, and he fixes the price at 7s. lOd. a ton, and, adding railway haulage, 2s. 6d., and royalty 6d. = 10s. lOd. f.o.b. Westport. Mr. Joachim says that only one-fifth of the coal taken from the mine is fit for sale as screened household coal, and he divides the price in this way: 1 ton of screened coal at incline, 145., and 4 tons at 6s. 3d., average, 7s. lOd. The freight to Wellington is ss. 6d. The trade get screened coal at £1 2s. 6d. He says : —" Six months ago we raised the price Is. We could sell unscreened coal in Wellington at 18s. 6d. and should be glad to sell it at that. The retail price, Dunedin was £2 for screened household. It was £1 17s. up to January last. We get £1 4s. 6d. at the ship's side in Dunedin and £1 ss. 6d. at Lyttelton. We screen coal at Lyttelton and charge £1 Bs. for it. In Auckland we get £1 4s. to £1 75., according to size of cargoes." The Christchurch agent of the company, Mr. Thomas Brown, told us that they sold coal free on trucks at Lyttelton : screened, £1 ss. to £1 65.; unscreened, 19s. 6d. to £1 Is.; small, 16s. to 16s. 6d.; and in some large contracts, 15s. 6d. for small. Out of 100 tons of face-coal they would get 40 tons of round or screened household and 60 tons small, or nuts and slack. Taking 100 tons of face-coal at 18s. 6d. = value, £92 10s., and adding 2s. 6d. a ton for labour in screening, £12 10s. = £105. He produces screened coal, 40 tons at £1 Bs., £56; small coal, 60 tons at 165., £48 = £104. The question of price and distribution will however, be discussed under another head. The Westport Coal Company may be said to have in round numbers about half a million of money invested in the mines. The colony has an even larger sum invested in the harbour works at Westport and in the railway from Westport to Mokihinui. The present prosperity of the town of Westport is dependent, in a very large degree, upon the coal-mining industry, and should it fail, the town will fail with it, and the colony will lose largely on the investment in harbour works and railway. The following memorandum supplied by Mr. Greenland, secretary of the Westport Harbour Board, shows the expenditure from Ist January, 1885, to 31st December, 1900 (prior to 1885 perhaps £20,000 had been spent on the harbour) : —Ordinary harbour management, £53,772 14s. 7d. ; interest and sinking fund, £271,246 9s. sd. ; harbour works, £589,198 19s. lid.; railway from Ngakauwau to Mokihinui. £37,288 18s. Bd. ; purchase of Mokihinui Company's railway, £15,745 ; total, £1,033,283 10s. Id. To supply this expenditure the sum of £620,000 has been borrowed at 4 per cent, by the Harbour Board, under a General Government guarantee, and the balance (£413,283 10s. Id.) has been supplied from the revenue of the Board. To this expenditure must be added about £100,000 the colony expended in the railway from Westport to Ngakauwau, the success of which depends almost entirely upon the coal-trade. At present the Board is in a very prosperous condition, and shows an annual surplus of revenue over expenditure and interest of over £12,000, and it is intended to expend further moneys in improving the harbour and the facilities for loading vessels at the wharves. The colony has, therefore, a very substantial and direct interest in the continued prosperity of the Buller coalfield. If che present output can be increased, or even maintained, there will be no danger of either the company or colony losing money. We are not, your Excellency, professed geological experts, and we have not been called upon to examine the coal-measures with a view to our reporting upon the quantities still remaining, but it does not require a professional geologist or an exhaustive survey to know that the estimate put forth by the Geological Department, as being still a reliable estimate of the quantity of coal in the Buller Reserve and elsewhere in the colony, is deceptive, and though there might be some excuse for publishing it under authority in 1888, we are surprised that it has been republished in the Mines Record of 17th September, 1900. The gross quantity of coal estimated by Sir J. Hector to be contained in all the then-known coalfields in New Zealand was 443,948,000 tons. That estimate was made in 1888, and is only put forth as a rough estimate calculated from imperfect surveys. In 1900 the editor of the Mines Record gravely deducts 8,833,425 tons known to have been taken from the mines, and leaves the balance as the quantity calculated to be available. In the meantime it has been demonstrated that the data on which these quantities were calculated were absolutely misleading. Kawakawa was estimated to contain 11,000,000 tons, but the mines opened are exhausted after producing less than 1,000,000 tons, and there is only too much reason to fear that the other estimates are equally overstated. As to there being 138,000,000 tons in the Buller, as estimated in the table published, the only chance of there being anything like that quantity consists in the possibility that there may be deposits on the flats and beneath the sea, of which at present no sign has been discovered, and of which, consequently, no account was taken in framing the estimate. The coalfields of New Zealand have confounded all the previous knowledge of professed experts, and the conclusions drawn from, data as to quantity have been already proved misleading and fallacious. The method of computation of quantity appears to have been as follows : —An acre contains 4,840 square yards, therefore coal with a superficies of 4,840 square yards and a depth of 1 yard contains 4,840 cubic yards, and generally, speaking of solids, as many tons ; deducting 1,840 tons for waste, there is left 3,000 tons per acre on a 3 ft. seam, or 1,000 tons per acre per foot of seam. This is the formula adopted in estimating quantities of coal in a coal area, and when there is a small area, as that covered for instance in the Brunner workings, it turns out to be fairly correct. The fallacy lies in taking thousands, or even hundreds, of acres, and reckoning them as all containing the seam or seams of coal. Experience shows that it is very rare to find coal in New Zealand evenly distributed over even a small area, and that the outcrops are not to be relied on as indications of continuous seams. The hundreds of millions of tons in Sir James Hector's estimate