356 Report on tlie Geological Structure of the Salt Bange. [No. 4. 



that the auriferous source is somewhere to the north, and that by 

 tracing the gold stream, so to speak, we might arrive at a point 

 where the drifted materials become coarser, and where the gold, 

 from its high specific gravity, has been deposited in larger quantity. 



By a similar method of reasoning, Messrs. Clarke and Hargreaves, 

 in 1851, were led to the discovery of the extensive gold fields in 

 the alluvial deposits of the Bathurst district, in Australia, where the 

 amount of gold obtained, seems likely to produce an entire revolu- 

 tion in the monetary system of the world. 



Prom the similarity of the central hilly districts of the gold fields 

 of Australia with the auriferous districts of the Ural mountains, 

 Sir Boderick Murchison, so early as the year 1844, predicted the 

 existence of gold fields " and in 1846 he addressed the President of 

 the Geological Society of Cornwall on the subject, and recommended 

 any Cornish tin-miners who were unemployed to emigrate to New 

 South Wales and dig for gold in the debris and drift, on the flanks 

 of, what he had previously termed, the Australian Cordilleras, in 

 which he had recently heard that gold had been discovered in small 

 quantities." Had the British Government then attended to the 

 suggestions of science, much of the evil resulting from the recent 

 announcement of the abundance of gold might have been prevented 

 by the timely introduction of suitable regulations for its mining. 



Gold, wherever it has been noticed in veins, is found in greatest 

 quantity near their surface, " which accounts for the existence of the 

 metal in such abundance" in the debris of auriferous rocks, "the 

 same agencies which deposited the drifted materials having also 

 carried away the gold from the superficial portions of the veins in 

 which it was originally formed." 



In the sandstones and grits, but especially in the latter, bones, 

 teeth, &c. occur. The bones seem chiefly to be the remains of large 

 mammalia and are of a grey or a light brown colour. They are 

 generally fragmentary, and are much rubbed, as if they had been 

 transported from a distance. Associated with them we have found 

 portions of the teeth of a species of mastodon and of a mammoth 

 or elephant, the tusks of which, of enormous size, are occasionally 

 found imbedded in the sandstone. "We have also procured the core 



