E. H. L. Schivarz — Gold in Cape Colony. 377 



yet the whole of the creek sides have been closely and systematically 

 searched in vain for reefs containing nugget gold. Unless the 

 nuggets have grown in the place they are found in by deposition 

 from solution, where can they have come from ? 



5. The solution theory accounts for all known facts. The 

 solvent salt ferric sulphate as well as perhaps a little chlorine is 

 present in the surface water ; the gold would therefore be dissolved, 

 and according as it was redeposited slowly by evaporation or 

 instantaneously by reduction of the ferric to the ferrous sulphate, the 

 nugget would be built up with sharp edges or in a rounded form. 



Gold is found in fairly average quantity in gravel on an old river 

 level called the Poverty Flats, and also in the mud of the estuary of 

 both the large rivers that drain the Millwood area, the Gowkamma 

 (Homtini) and the Knysna. In both these cases I think it easier to 

 explain the carriage of the precious metal by the solution theory 

 rather than on the gravitation theory, for gold being so heavy tends 

 to remain where it is in the quartz-reefs, and when found in the 

 river-beds it sticks in the hollows and joints of the rocks. 



The Prince Albert Goldfields. 



The first gold nugget was picked up in the Prince Albert 

 Goldfields in 1871, and twenty years afterwards the fields were 

 proclaimed ; they were de - proclaimed in 1898, but since then 

 a good deal of prospecting has been carried on.^ So far the 

 gold has been only found on the surface ; there are innumerable 

 quartz-veins about here, from an inch or so in width to a foot and 

 more, formed of interlocking combs of quartz crystals ; the gold is 

 often found in them on the surface, but directly they are sunk upon 

 all traces of gold disappear. The gravels are fairly rich in some 

 places, especially under ledges of sandstone which get loosened on 

 the surface, and some of the nuggets are so fresh that they often 

 exhibit minute octahedra of gold adhering to them with the faces 

 quite bright and unscratched. There are many big saurian bones in 

 the locality which lie about the surface as they weather out of the 

 softer shales, and some of these have also been found to contain 

 crystals of gold in their hollow parts. Mr. H. M. Oakley, who was 

 at one time InsiDector of Mines on the fields, informs me that those 

 who used copper pans for washing for the gold very frequently 

 found them coated with mercury after a short while. 



So much prospecting had been done on these fields that I was 

 compelled to reluctantly state that the gold must be alluvial, and had 

 been brought from a distance. From a geological point of view this 

 was what I should have expected, as the Karroo shales are too 

 unaltered and too young a formation altogether to carry highly 

 mineralized veins, and the veinstone, also, is so totally different from 

 the usual gold-bearing quartz that no miner would sink on the 

 specimens obtained from the reefs. 



^ An interesting description of these fields, with an account of the general geology, 

 was published by Mr. Sawyer as a Parliamentary Report, G. 45, 1893 ; the whole 

 question was again discussed by the author, Trans. Phil. Soc. S.A., 1904, xv, pt. 2. 



