From his limited appliances and means, a prospector’s object is to find a vein or reef of gold-bearing ore, not by sinking, but from surface indications.

Veins or reefs may be described as layers, which have been deposited in fissures and cracks in the rock surrounding them.  The enclosing rock is known as the “country rock.”  “Lodes” are veins composed of a mixture of quartz, ironstone, and other material, and usually exceed in width the “reefs,” which sometimes, as at Southern Cross, attain thirty feet, but are rarely more than one to four feet in thickness.  The part of a reef showing above the surface is the “outcrop,” which may appear either as a mass or “blow” of quartz, sometimes sixty feet in height, or as a solid wall or dyke which can be followed for perhaps five miles without a break; the direction in which it runs is known as its “strike.”

Reefs may go down vertically, or on a sloping “dip” or “underlay.”  The country rock lying immediately above the reef is the “hanging wall,” and that immediately below, the “foot wall.”

In prospecting a reef, a miner walks along the strike of the outcrop, “napping” as he goes, i.e., breaking off with a hammer or pick, pieces of the quartz or ironstone outcrop.  Each fragment is carefully examined for the presence of gold, which is nearly always found, if on the surface, in a free state, that is to say, uncombined with any other mineral.  If any gold is present, it may occur in small specks as fine as flour, or in large solid lumps as big as one’s fist, as in Bayley’s Reward Claim, Londonderry, and one or two other mines.  In the latter case the rich find would immediately be pegged out as a claim, or lease, and work commenced, the coarse gold being won by the simple process of “dollying” the ore; or pounding it in an iron mortar with an iron pestle, and passing it when crushed, through a series of sieves in which the gold, too large to fall through, is held.

To estimate roughly the worth of a reef in which only fine gold is visible it is necessary to take several samples along the outcrop, “dolly” them, and wash the powdered quartz by means of two iron dishes, from which the light material is floated off, leaving the gold behind.  From a series of experiments an idea can be formed as to whether the reef is worth further work.

It will be found on napping a reef, that the gold occurs at more or less regular intervals.  This deposit of gold in the surface outcrop is the top of a “shoot” of gold, which may be followed down on the underlay for many feet.  And this peculiarity in the distribution of the metal has been the cause of much disappointment and misunderstanding.

Having determined that your reef is good enough on the surface, the next thing to be done is to ascertain, by means of cuts and shafts, its nature below the surface.  This may be done either by an underlay shaft, which follows the reef down from the surface, or by a vertical shaft, sunk some distance away from the outcrop, to cut the reef perhaps one hundred feet below.