PROSPECTING IN CORNWALL. 197 



The discovery was made by a man who knew nothing about 

 minerals, and geology, and assaying ; but he happened to strike 

 on something that he thought had better be sent to the hands of 

 the assayer. And, to his great astonishment, the ore was 

 reported to be rich in gold. In connection with these deposits 

 it was remarkable that the granite, through which these intrusive 

 rocks passed, had become impregnated with the gold, just in the 

 same way that they had the stanniferous granite in many of the 

 lodes in Cornwall. He had seen hundreds and thousands of 

 tons of granite which, under ordinary circumstances, he should 

 have declared to be absolutely worthless, and which would be 

 thrown away, containing as much as four ounces of gold to the 

 ton, and this was due entirely to the impregnation of the rock 

 itself from the influence of these thermal waters, which had 

 come up through the spaces produced by these eruptive rocks. 

 The miner had come to the conclusion that, because gold occurred 

 in Cripple Creek in such large quantities, there was a probability 

 of its occurring everywhere, and so the prospector was very 

 busy all through the Western Eocky Mountains, endeavouring 

 to discover new Cripple Creeks. The importance of the dis- 

 covery was that Cripple Creek, although only five years old, 

 had, with the town and its suburbs, a population now, not far 

 from 15,000 people, three lines of railway running into it, and 

 an output of gold, for 1895, amounting to eight millions of 

 dollars. This was a rapid development, considering the short 

 time the district had been discovered as a gold-producing one. 



Since he had been in Cornwall, he had taken a few oppor- 

 tunities of moving among mining districts, and it had struck 

 him there was quite room for the prospector in Cornwall to-day. 

 He might be wrong but, between thirty and forty years ago, he 

 did a great deal of work in Cornwall in hunting up, more 

 particularly, the minerals of the county, and it had struck him 

 that since that time he had seen nothing done in the way of any 

 new discovery, or search after new deposits in any new district. 

 He was struck with what appeared in a newspaper he read at 

 Denver, not long ago ; the paper referred to Phoenix mines, and 

 the possibility of their being closed, and he thought it stated 

 that there was one well-known lode in the sett which had never 

 been prospected, and on which nothing had ever been done to 



