formerly conducted in the County ofWicklorm. 3 



were destroyed, Government had been fully reimbursed its 

 advances, the produce of the undertaking having defrayed its 

 own expenses, and left a surplus in hand. In the year 1801, 

 the operations were resumed, when the directors proposed to 

 Government not to confine its views to the mere collection of 

 the alluvial gold, but to extend the researches, directing them 

 more particularly toward the discovery of auriferous veins. 

 They were justified, as they conceived, in this proposition by 

 the following considerations : 



" 1. The well-known fact, that in the various quarters of the 

 world, in America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, auriferous veins 

 often occur in the mountains adjacent to the districts that 

 abound in massy alluvial gold*. 



f* 2. The peculiar circumstances under which the native gold 

 of Croghan Kinshela was found. — It occurred in massy lumps, 

 and in small pieces, down to the minutest grain. One piece 

 weighed twenty- two ounces, another eighteen ounces, a third 

 nine ounces, and a fourth seven ounces. The gold was found, 

 accompanied by other metallic substances, dispersed through 

 a kind of stratum composed of clay, sand, gravel, and frag- 

 ments of rock, and covered by soil, which sometimes attained 

 to a very considerable depth, from twenty to fifty feet, in the 

 bed and banks of the different streams. By the operations in 

 the stream-works, (which are too well known to professed 

 miners to need detail on the present occasion,) all the metallic 

 particles thus disseminated were collected in a concentrated 

 mass; and in those at Ballinvalley it was constantly found 

 that the gold was attended by magnetic ironstone, sometimes 

 in masses of half a hundred weight, by magnetic ironsand, 

 by cubical and dodecahedral iron pyrites ; and, in small pieces 

 and grains, by specular iron ore, brown and red ironstone, 

 iron ochre, fragments of tinstone crystals, wolfram, gray ore 

 of manganese, pieces of quartz and chlorite, and sometimes 

 fragments of quartz crystals. I observed and collected also 

 some specimens, which show that the gold, magnetic ironstone, 

 and wolfram were each of them frequently intermingled with 

 quartz ; and I have also a few specimens which exhibit the 

 gold not only incorporated with iron ochre, but ramifying in 

 slight threads through wolfram. Some of the gold, though 

 very rarely? occurred crystallized in octohedrons, and also in 



*• See, for example, the Travels of Ulloa and Humboldt in America ; 

 Molina's Chili ; Park's Travels in Africa; Marsden's Sumatra; Turner's 

 Thibet; Abhandlungen iiber Bergbaukunde ; Dr. Clarke's Travels in Europe, 

 Asia, and Africa, vol. iv. ; Robilant on Piedmont, in Journal des Mines, 

 vol. ix.; and D'Aubuisson in vol. xxix." 



B2 



