THE COMSTOCK LODE. 77 



of six small stopes in the Overman are so closely arranged, and the intervals 

 between them so nearly up to the working tenure of silver, that they may be 

 safely called one bonanza. The Belcher and Crown Point west, and the thin 

 sheet which traverses the Gold Hill quartz, belong, as has been seen, to the 

 west sheet. The others occupy the east vein and arrange themselves on a 

 middle zone along the east wall, with their greatest developments tangent to 

 its conchoidal curve. This family of bonanzas expands from a central point 

 in the bottom of the Yellow Jacket south mine, and distributes its bodies in 

 a fan-shape through the quartz. Those bonanzas which rise to the south are 

 less richly charged, smaller in area, thinner, and less definitely bounded than 

 the northern bodies. These latter, especially the immense Gold Hill bonan- 

 zas, are very thick, very richly charged, and bounded by a sudden change in 

 the quality of the quartz, and a sudden giving out of the tenure of the ore. 

 It is interesting to observe that all the lines of motion which are traceable, 

 either in the fluting of the east wall or in the striations upon clay surfaces, 

 indicate a movement in the direction of the north bodies ; and further, 

 wherever a second deposit of quartz has been formed, it has evidently fol- 

 lowed the general axis of the northern bonanzas, ascending from the bottom 

 of the Yellow Jacket toward the northern Gold Hill claims, at an angle of 

 45°. These secondary deposits of quartz are visible in the filmy coat- 

 ings of silica deposited upon the southern and lower sides of quartz blocks, 

 and especially of quartz crystals. Wherever the gangue has formed vugs, or 

 considerable masses of crystals, they are coated on their lower and southern 

 sides with a crystalline deposit of silica. The largest single bonanza in the 

 whole lode is that of Gold Hill. Its longer axis is horizontal, occupying the 

 eastern quartz for a longitudinal expansion of 1,100 feet, descending from 

 the surface to the 700-foot level. The Virginia chimney next north of this 

 contains almost an exact repetition of this arrangement of bonanzas. When 

 Baron Richthofen wrote his admirable paper on the Comstock lode, he gave 

 it as his opinion that the mode of occurrence of ore difiered in these two 

 chambers ; that while the quartz of Virginia gathered its ore in segregated 

 bodies, that of Gold Hill contained it uniformly distributed in sheets of great 

 length. But subsequent developments have demonstrated the incorrectness 

 of this idea. The great Gold Hill bonanza, which gave rise to this hypothesis, 



