XX PROCEEDINGS. 



the past three years of tlie keen and wide-spread interest taken in our 

 chief mineral export — coal, and our principal mineral import — iron 

 Die. The disturbing intluence which accompanied the rapid develop- 

 ment of iron and steel plants, and the re-equipment of old, and the 

 establishment of new collieries, affected all classes, and largely those 

 which had grown up since the local gold fever was epidemic in the 

 late sixties. The intluence of general prosperity stimulated search foi- 

 mineral wealth in every direction, including the improbable and 

 impossible, regardless of the pessimistic records acquired in the interest 

 of science, without monetary stimulus. The onlooking student can 

 learn much of human nature by observing the I'eady acceptance of 

 alluring promises made by designing or untrained promoters, while 

 the cautious utterances of the experienced are waved aside. The unit 

 in the army of searchers, that the law of averages makes successful, is 

 individualized and quoted as an authority by the rest, pitted as it 

 were against individuals from the ranks of science, whom the same 

 law would allow to blunder, or be unfortunate, without detriment to 

 the correctness of a general truth. 



And yet, of late, public confidence has been shown to a surprising 

 degree, in some general deductions of a scientific nature, when it was 

 assumed their successful application might result in financial success. 

 The investigations of Mr. H. Fletcher of the Geological Survej" in 

 Cumberland and Colchester Counties, have made it possible that the 

 views hitherto held on the structure of that region might be erroneous, 

 and they have justified a letter I wrote to a member of parliament in 

 1894, urging a re-survey of that ground ; and when this change of 

 view, the result of Mr. Fletcher's explorations was realized, a boom 

 was created, and application for mineral rights over the entire area 

 brought in large sums to the j^rovincial coffers, the supposition now 

 being held that extensions of the thick seams of Springhill may pos- 

 sibly occupy in depth the basins east and west of that elevation and to 

 the northward of the Cobequid Hills. To prove this theory, bore-holes 

 to considerable depths and systematically placed, alone can determine 

 the correctness of the hopes indulged in. 



Mr. Fletcher's examination goes to show tliat the upper members 

 of the series continue to the Cobequid Hills, without a reappearance 

 at the surface of the underlving Millstone Grit as was assumed on the 



