40 
oceanic, or other, in a former period of onr globe's history. 
The local characteristics of a landslip, when recent, may 
have been long obliterated, by the levelling action of water- 
flow ; and sedimentary deposits may have hidden the aspects 
of processes we are left to discover by the operations of the 
intelligent miner. In such cases the reef in situ should be 
sought for, on physical reasoning on the conjectured position 
in the hill, or valley side, adjacent, from which the mass has 
fallen. Our alluvial miners, again, are often perplexed by 
theories of lava flow, reef washes, «fcc. Hence, good ami 
extensive alluvial claims, largely jn-oductive for a time, are 
too often abandoned. Boring to moderate depths by im- 
proved machinery is by no means so costly as of itself to 
induce capitalists either to work their mines expensively, by 
shafts and drives, while only prospecting, or to abandon 
them. But though our most valuable nuggets, and much 
good gold has been got very near the surface, the geologist 
assures the miner that he must sink through some four 
series of basaltic layers before he can reasonably hope to 
reach truly payable wash. In Mexico and California the 
very richest drifts have been traced from pits sunk on the 
outflow of almost surface drifts, and several successive layers 
of payable wash are regularly worked in very many mining 
claims. By amalgamation of adjacent claim-holding companies 
on the Ballarat gold field, similar discoveries of successive 
layers of auriferous, and amply payable drifts, throughout 
all, or most of the areas now deemed worked out, might be 
made by boring, which should supersede the groping in the 
dark, with hap-hazard aims, at expense destructive to the 
enterprise in very many cases, as the shareholders soon 
withdraw confidence, and withhold necessary calls. 
Coal is also too often prospected for on false i>rinciples of 
mining by shafts or bores, at haphazard, in what is deemed 
"likely looking ground" for yielding carbonaceous strata. 
But if catastrophic aqueous action at successive epochs be 
admitted, as also the origin of coal, as being from drift into 
amphitheatre-like hollows of sea bottom, of sea-meadow 
foliage (and the marine palm-like trees of the southern 
ocean, adjacent to Terra del Fuego, some of which are stated 
to grow 1,500 feet in length, with soft woody stems anil 
leaves, are similar to the foliage of palms in the tropics), 
which I suggest as the origin of coal formation, we must 
examine the dip of the more ancient stratifications, and bore 
towards the former beds of depressions in the earth's crust. 
A late article on "Marine Flora" in Chambers's Journal states 
that "a curious fact is found in the intimate relation which 
