1922] Whitman: Genesis of the Ores of the Cobalt District 281 



syncline, nor the Kerr Lake anticline, nor in the neighborhood of 

 either Glenn Lake or the Timiskaming and Beaver mines ; and yet 

 those have been very productive localities. Also the Cobalt Lake fault 

 has not been productive to any notable extent, only small quantities 

 of ore occurring within 400 feet of the surface for very limited dis- 

 tances along its strike, much exploratory work having been done on 

 it only to prove it generally barren. Those who look to ascending 

 solutions for the origin of these ores should certainly expect to find 

 such a fault lined with ore bodies, or to find the ore bodies of the dis- 

 trict grouped with reference to it. If they say that the ore-bearing 

 solutions ascended along it, and upon reaching the diabase contacts, 

 spread out along these to do their work, the answer is that, if that is 

 true, those solutions then began at once to deposit ore in neighboring 

 fractures — selecting only one particular kind — and that they must 

 then have moved along these undulating contacts, ascending and 

 descending, as far as the Timiskaming mine, where ore bodies as good 

 as any in the district were deposited, no trace of these solutions being 

 left along the contacts themselves. In view of the obvious difficulties 

 in the way of this supposition, and the conspicuous scarcity of ore 

 on the Cobalt Lake fault, the theory seems entirely untenable. 



It is further to be noted that although commercial ore bodies have 

 been mined in the South Lorrain, Casey, and Gowganda areas, no 

 faults of any description have been found to carry notable quantities 

 of ore there, and the ore bodies mined seem to be wholly unrelated to 

 any sort of faults or steep contacts. Even in the Cobalt district where 

 rich ore bodies have been mined on steep-dipping minor faults, such 

 occurrences are the exception rather than the rule. 



In times past there was waged a notable controversy on the matter 

 of the circulation and burden of underground waters, one side main- 

 taining that the source of ore-bearing waters lay in congealing intru- 

 sive masses, while the other side held their origin to be atmospheric. 

 The waters were presumed to be either juvenile or meteoric, and to 

 have circulated in such quantitity along the sites of ore-deposition 

 as to have brought thither, in spite of their acknowledged diluteness, 

 all the ore-forming substances. It is interesting to note that each side 

 showed the suppositions of the other to be untenable, and its kind of 

 water to be incapable either of acquiring an adequate mineral burden 

 or of flowing in sufficient quantity to accomplish the work ascribed 

 to it. In my study of the problem of vein genesis at Cobalt I have 

 been forced to the conclusion that each side in that controversy was 

 correct in its exclusion of the claims of the other. 



