Quartz, dense and milky, also in quartz of nearly every colour and appearance, saccharoidal, crystalline, nay, even in clear glass-like six-sided prismatic crystals, and associated with silver, copper, lead, arsenic, iron as sulphide, oxide, carbonate, and tungstate, antimony, bismuth, nickel, zinc, lead, and other metals in one form or another; in slate, quartzite, mica schist, granite, diorite, porphyry, felsite, calcite, dolomite, common carbonate of iron, siliceous sinter from a hot spring, as at Mount Morgan; as alluvial gold in drifts formed of almost all these materials; and once, perhaps the most curious matrix of all, a small piece of apparently alluvial gold, naturally imbedded in a shaly piece of coal.  This specimen, I think, is in the Sydney Museum.  One thing, however, the prospector may make sure of:  he will always find gold more or less intimately associated with silica (Quartz) in one or other of its many forms, just as he will always find cassiterite (oxide of tin) in the neighbourhood of granite containing muscovite (white mica), which so many people will persist in terming talc.  It is stated to be a fact that tin has never been found more than about two miles from such granite.

From what has been said of its widely divergent occurrences it will be admitted that the Cornish miners’ saying with regard to metals generally applies with great force to gold:  “Where it is, there it is”:  and “Cousin Jack” adds, with pathetic emphasis, “and where it is generally, there I ain’t.”

I have already spoken of the geological “country rock” in which red gold is most likely to be discovered—­i.e., the junction of the slates and schists with the igneous or metamorphic (altered) rocks, or in this vicinity.  Old river beds formed of gravelly drifts in the same neighbourhood may probably contain alluvial gold, or shallow deposits of “wash” on hillsides and in valleys will often carry good surface gold.  This is sometimes due to the denudation, or wearing away, of the hills containing quartz-veins—­that is, where the alluvial gold really was derived from such veins, which, popular opinion to the contrary, is not always the case.

Much disappointment and loss of time and money may sometimes be prevented if prospectors will realise that all alluvial gold does not come from the quartz veins or reefs; and that following up an alluvial lead, no matter how rich, will not inevitably develop a payable gold lode.  Sometimes gold, evidently of reef origin, is found in the alluvial; but in that case it is generally fine as regards the size of the particles, more or less sharp-edged, or crystalline in form if recently shed; while such gold is often of poorer quality than the true alluvial which occurs in mammillary (breast-like) nuggets, and is of a higher degree of purity as gold.