ANCIENT COPPER MINE NEAR D'SJATE. 

 By Henry Alexander Spencer, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. 



On the hill-side of one of the outliers of the Lulu Mountains, 

 in the valley of the Mopetsi River, Lydenburg, and perhaps five 

 miles from the residence of the Rev. Mr. Winter at D'sjate, I 

 visited an old working where, probably very many years ago, 

 copper ore had been quarried and smelted. 



For two years this old mine had been worked by two men, one 

 of whom was my companion, and had only been relinquished a 

 year or so before our visit. 



The old mine lay about half-way up a steep hill-side, into 

 which it cut at about a right angle with the surface. Outside the 

 adit was a rubble heap of considerable thickness, partly the refuse 

 of the old working and partly the additional dump of the recent 

 workers, who had sunk a perpendicular shaft through it to a 

 depth of over 30 feet. Mr. Massey, my companion, had told me 

 that when working this mine they had turned up " hundreds " 

 of what appeared to be stone hammers, with deep grooves in 

 them, so that I first set myself to find some of these paloeoliithic 

 curiosities. Three were soon found which combined all the char- 

 acteristics of their kind. These characteristics consist in their 

 being rounded, heavy, crystalline rock, such as were to be found 

 in any quantity in the river bed about two miles away. Some of 

 the surfaces of these stones, if not all of them, showed smooth, 

 worn concavities of varying size and depth, but always in the 

 centre of that surface ; these depressions and concavities have the 

 appearance of having been ground or worn out of the surface by 

 some hard substance which was fairly smooth and concentric. It 

 is extremely probable that they were held in the hand, for which 

 purpose they are all exactly sized and could comfortably be 

 grasped in one hand whilst they were used as hammers. A rather 

 surprising thing is that although the natives of this district know 

 nothing of the workers in these copper mines, which abound in 

 that and the neighbouring valleys, the use of these stones they 

 attribute to the workers in the mines having hammered stakes of 

 wood, hardened in the fire, into the rocks to split them, used, in 

 fact, as crowbars are to-day, i.e. driven in between the layers of 

 the rock and used to prise pieces off. This use of the stones 

 would exactly account for the appearance and position of the con- 

 cavities, hammering any harder substance than hardened wood 

 being sure to cause chipping. The formation of the rock here, 

 and I learn also in other similar mines, would readily lend itself 

 to this treatment. None of the natives, however, have any know- 

 ledge of such stakes having been found, describing the working 

 of these mines as long, long before their time and that of their 

 fathers. The stones give no indication whatever of having been 

 fastened in any way to a stick and used like a modern hammer ; 

 but many of them appear to have been discarded on account of 

 chipping of their surfaces in a way which would interfere with a 



