Tcii PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 



again, and will probably be in full work by tbe end of this year. 

 The mineral ground over which we have hitherto been travelling 

 has been chiefly tin, and we now enter upon the silver and 

 copper region, to be broken only by one other tin centre at 

 Koorboora. 



From Montalbion the route follows a branch of the 

 Walsh known as Gibb's Creek, and after passing Copper Hill at 

 live miles, runs roughly parallel with Emu Creek to Oakvale, 

 near which an interesting mineral spring breaks out through a 

 hole in a rock in the centre of a creek. The water is chalybeate, 

 and contains a little lithia. It is a fact always impressed on the 

 new chum that the water tastes of whisky : always of the brand 

 in vogue at the adjacent hotel. Mr. Wade, the proprietor of the 

 said hotel and of the spring, says he cannot account for this 

 strange phenomenon, which seems from my own investigations 

 not to have been known to the aborigines before the advent of 

 the white man. 



Another twelve miles In'iiigs us to the tin-mining 

 township of Koorboora, now waking into fresh life, but 

 ere it is reached is a range grimly called the Featherbed, from the 

 knuckly character of its ups and downs. Hereabouts for awhile 

 we are in the watershed of the Tate River, which Hows roughly 

 parallel with the ^^'alsh. A long stretch of granite country suc- 

 ceeds, and then about a mile east of Atherton's Station we enter 

 the true Chillagoe region. Speaking broadly, the country is 

 a synclinal trough, the rim and much of the l)ed of which is 

 formed of schists, slates, sandstones and quartzites. In this 

 trough, and lying unconformal)ly upon the schists, itc, is the 

 Chillagoe Limestone, very much denuded, its chief fragments 

 standing up as fantastic ruins of l)attlemented bastions. These, 

 as a rule, form more or less isolated masses, having the same 

 general trend as the trough, that is, north-west. Very strange 

 indeed is this country to the geologist. The road winds in and 

 out between the limestone fortresses, along dead-level bottoms 

 covered with a soil so red that one instinctively thinks of basalt. 

 It is, in fact, only the insoluble residiie from the wasted lime- 

 stone. This country extends all the way to the boundary of our 

 area, varying in width from a mile to ten miles, and flanked to 



