Chap. XIX.] 
GOLD OF AUSTEALIA. 
461 
the conviction that gold would sooner or later be found in the great British 
colony, I learnt in 1846 with satisfaction that a specimen of the metal had been 
discovered. I thereupon encouraged the unemployed miners of Cornwall to 
emigrate and dig for gold, as they dug for tin in the gravel of their own district. 
These notices were, as far as I know, the first printed documents relating to 
Australian gold. 
At that time California, inhabited only by pastoral Indians and a few mis- 
sionaries and Spanish herdsmen, was, it will be recollected, equally unknown to 
be auriferous. Its rich alluvial soil had not then been removed from the surface, 
and the accident at Sutter's Mill, in 1847, had not exposed the gold in the gravel 
and shingle beneath it. We can still better understand how this should have 
been the case with regard to vast tracts of Australia, where similar mineral 
constants exist, but where, instead of a comparatively advanced people, like the 
Mexicans or Peruvians, a wretched, race, incapable of appreciating the uses of 
the precious metals, had been for ages the sole inhabitants of a vast continent. 
Unwilling to offer what must be a very imperfect epitome of the distribution 
of gold in Australia, I may, however, be permitted to say a few words on a 
subject to which I called the practical attention of my countrymen for several 
successive years previous to the discovery of the gold-fields of that vast 
region. 
At or before that period, geological descriptions of various parts of Au- 
stralia had been published by Mitchell, Strzelecki, Jukes, &c, without any 
allusion whatever to gold. The Rev. W. B. Clarke did, however, rouse the 
attention of the inhabitants of New South Wales in 1847 to the auriferous cha- 
racter of these rocks, and indicated, as I had previously done, their similarity to 
the rocks of the Ural Mountains, including the meridional direction of the two 
chains. This zealous geologist has since explored the largest range of its gold- 
bearing lands over upwards of six degrees of latitude, or from the Peel Biver on 
the north to the Australian Alps of Strzelecki on the south, where the watershed 
or Cordillera, rising in Mount Kosciusko to 6500 feet above the sea, trends south- 
eastwards into the province of Victoria. From this author, and from the vo- 
luminous details published for the use of the Houses of Parliament *, as afforded 
by Stutchbury and others, as well as from the work of Mr. Hargreaves \, who, 
in 1851, first proved the great value of Australian gold-mining, it was ascertained 
that the parallel I had drawn in 1844 between the rocks of the chain which I 
had termed the ' Australian Cordillera ' and those of the Ural Mountains is 
well sustained %. Just as in Siberia, the greatest amount of gold is found in 
of 1845. It also appears that the Eev. W. C. Clarke 
wrote to a friend in the colony (1841), mentioning 
that he had found gold-ore ; but this circumstance 
remained as much unknown to myself and all Eu- 
ropean men of science as the other. My views, 
whatever they may be worth, were therefore 
formed quite irrespectively of any such proceed- 
ings, as the following extract from a letter of my 
friend Count Strzelecki to myself, received whilst 
the first edition was passing through the press, 
amply testifies : — " Nothing can give me greater 
pleasure and comfort at any time than to bear 
my humble testimony to the inductive powers 
which you displayed on the occasion of your pre- 
dictions in regard to the existence of gold in Au- 
stralia ; and consequently I can affirm now, as I 
did, and do whenever a necessity occurs, that I 
never mentioned my discovery or supposed dis- 
covery of Australian gold to you, prior to your 
papers on the subject, nor after their publica- 
tion." 
Having disposed of other cases in the first edi- 
tion, I now simply affirm that no one, whether in 
Britain or the colonies, had for several years 
printed anything on the auriferous characters of 
the Australian rocks except myself, and that my 
memoirs of 1844, 1845, and 1846 are the earliest 
publications relating to this subject. See note, 
first page of this Chapter, for reference to all my 
works on this subject. 
* See ' Blue Books ' <; Belative to the Eecent 
Discovery of Gold in Australia," presented to both 
Houses of Parliament, 1852-53. For my own 
connexion officially with this subject in 1848, see 
the Papers on the same subject, presented August 
16, 1853, p. 43. 
t ' Australia and its Gold-fields,' 1855. 
I Few circumstances have more gratified me 
than that several of the leading men of New 
South Wales (including Sir Charles Nicholson 
and Sir Stuart Donaldson) should, on revisiting 
England, have testified publicly to the value which 
was attached in New South Wales to my early 
comparison of that region with the Ural Moun- 
