country never even hear.  Go into any of the great mining works of central Germany, and you may see acres covered by machinery ingeniously constructed to clean, break, and sort, and ultimately deliver the ores into trucks or direct into the furnace, and the whole under the supervision of a youngster or two.  When a parcel of ore arrives at any of the works, say Freiberg or Clausthal, it is carefully assayed by three or four different persons and then handed over to practical experts, who are expected to produce the full amount of previous metal according to assay; and if by any chance they do not, a fixed percentage of the loss is deducted from their salary; or, if the result is in excess of this assay which is more frequently the case, a small bonus is added to their pay.  Compare this system with our own wasteful, reckless method of dealing with our precious metals, and we may hide our heads in very shame.”

All really practical men will, I think, endorse Mr. Rauft’s opinion.  Well organised and conducted schools of mines will gradually ameliorate this unsatisfactory state of things, and I hope before long that we shall have none but qualified certificated men in our mines.  In the meantime a few practical hints, particularly on that very difficult branch of the subject, the saving of gold, will, it is hoped, be found of service.

The extraction of gold from the soil is an industry so old that its first introduction is lost in the mist of ages.  As before stated, gold is one of the most widely disseminated of the metals, and man, so soon as he had risen from the lowest forms of savagery, began to be attracted by the kingly metal, which he found to be easily fashioned into articles of ornament and use, and to be practically non-corrodable.

What we now term the dish or pan, then, doubtless generally a wooden bowl, was the appliance first used; but they had also an arrangement, somewhat like our modern blanket tables, over which the auriferous sand was passed by means of a stream of water.  The sands of some of the rivers from which portions of the gold supply of the old world was derived are still washed over year after year in exactly the same manner as was employed, probably, thousands of years ago, the labour, very arduous, being often carried on by women, who, standing knee deep in water, pan off the sand in wooden bowls much as the digger in modern alluvial fields does with his tin dish.  The resulting gold often consists of but a grain or two of fine dust-gold, which is carefully collected in quills, and so exported or traded for goods.

The digger of to-day having discovered payable alluvial dirt at such a depth as to permit of its being profitably worked by small parties of men with limited or no capital, procures first a half hogshead for a puddling tub, a “cradle,” or “long tom,” and tin dish.  The “wash dirt,” as the auriferous drift is usually termed, contains a considerable admixture of clay of a more or less tenacious