132 SPKING MEETING. 



One result was the discovery of gold in an entirely new district : — 

 the gold did not occur in native form, but in connection with 

 tellurium. The discovery, as in many other cases, was made by a 

 man who knew nothing about minerals or assaying. He struck on 

 something which he thought might be sent to the assayer, and to 

 his astonishment it proved to contain gold. He (the speaker) had 

 seen granite, which under ordinary circumstances would be 

 thrown away, containing 4-ozs. of gold to the ton ; it had in fact 

 been impregnated with gold by thermal waters. Prospectors 

 were just now very busy all through the Rocky Mountains trying 

 to discover, if possible, other Crippleereeks. Cripplecreek was 

 only five years old, and was already a place of some 1 5,000 

 inhabitants with three railways running into it. Tts output of 

 gold in 1895 was worth eight millions of dollars. After moving 

 among the miners of Cornwall, he had come to the conclusion 

 that there was plenty of room for prospecting in this county to-day. 

 Thirty or forty years ago he did a great deal of work in hunting 

 up the minerals of Cornwall, and it struck him that, since that 

 time, nothing had been done in the way of making any new 

 discovery, and search had scarcely been made for any deposit 

 in new districts. 



It distressed him very much as a Cornishman to hear of the 

 depression that existed ; but he thought that if he might be 

 allowed to say so, it was due more particularly to the slow and 

 indifferent habits of the Cornish miners themselves. He said 

 this without the slightest hesitation — they wanted modern ideas 

 and modern systems of working introduced into their mines, to 

 make them successful and profitable. Only on the previous day 

 he went to the bottom of Dolcoath, a depth of 440 fathoms, and 

 there saw what he had never seen before, an enormous vein of 

 rich tin — shewing externally a lode of forty odd feet. They had 

 that enormous lode but hardly any means of getting at it, or of 

 treating it when they had got it. In the Butte district of Arizona 

 they returned 120 tons of copper from 2,000 tons of stuff, every 

 day, from a lode no richer than that which he saw at Dolcoath. 

 It behoved them to introduce more spirit into their Cornish 

 engineers, and to get them to adopt modern ideas and modern 

 systems of working which were so successfully carried out in 

 other countries, Q-old had been known to occur in Cornwall, 



