GOLD OCCURRENCE IN QUEENSLAND. 125 
is likely to take precedence of all other countries in yield of gold. 
It is an old and homely proverb that you cannot have both 
meal and malt from your barley, also that one cannot eat a cake 
and have it as well, and this proverb has a great bearing on what 
I am about to advance. 
It is well known that for hundreds and thousands of years there 
has been a steady export of gold in the shape of alluvial ‘* dust” 
from the continent of Africa, alike on its west coast, and from 
those parts that border the Levant and Red Sea, and this has 
held good from before the days of King Solomon, Ophir, and 
Tarshish, until now. Statistics are silent as to the quantity of 
gold, but it must have been very great indeed. ‘Then again, we 
have it on record that the princes of Hindostan possess uncounted 
treasures of gold in coin and jewels, the produce of their country, 
whose alluvial gold resources could alone have furnished them ; 
for there was neither there nor in Africa any gold quartz crushing 
machinery fifty years ago. Hence the gold exported from and in 
use in both places must have been both local in origin and alluvial 
in character. ‘The same remark may apply to Peru and Mexico, 
where gold was so abundant and used for domestic utensils 300 
years ago, and which must all have been alluvial in the absence 
of the stampers of our nineteeth century. I cannot speak with 
certainty of the produce in gold of the Ural Mountains in Russia, 
but I fancy that reef gold must predominate there. Some massive 
specimens that I have seen show free gold and malachite, exactly 
like the early raised stone from the “ Alliance” reef at Morinish, 
near Rockhampton. 
We may fairly infer from what I have here stated that the 
confessedly rich alluvial gold deposits of Peru, Mexico, Africa, 
and India, must have greatly impoverished the reefs in all these 
places. Indian and African reefs will rarely ‘‘ pay.” No place, 
with the exception, possibly, of Brazil and the country lying north- 
ward between it and the Spanish main, will ever come to rival 
Queensland in the production per ounce per ton of reef gold. 
California and New Zealand can never do it, for they are both 
handicapped in the alloying mixture of silver with their gold, to 
an extent which affects its value greatly. The colony of Victoria 
affords us a striking example of the way in which the alluvial gold 
has ‘‘robbed” the reef. The full yield of alluvial, so far, from all 
Victoria, may be safely put down as between 150 and 200 millions 
sterling, and to this extent the reefs have suffered, and the result 
is that something like g‘dwts. of gold per ton is the average reef 
produce of Victoria. Contrast this with Queensland, where, with 
