444 
THE ENGLISH CALIFORNIA. 
BY G. P. BEVAN, F.G.S., EDITOR OF “HURRAY’S HAND-BOOKS OF 
NORTH AND SOUTH WALES,” ETC. 
N EARLY all my readers have at one time or another seen 
a nugget — have handled it, wondered at its weight, and 
possibly its shabby appearance, and have involuntarily con- 
nected it with the arid hills of California and Australia, with 
hordes of undisciplined rapparees and savages (all the worse 
for coming from a civilized country), with tales of distress, 
starvation, robbery, and murder, with ne’er-do-weels, whom 
they formerly knew leaving the old country poor, and returning 
rich, after a few years’ absence, with portmanteaus full of nug- 
gets and carpet-bags full of gold-dust. But it lias probably 
never struck them, that the same geological circumstances 
which have produced the material of those nuggets hi a distant 
hemisphere have operated at home in our quiet British isles : in 
other words, that gold has been found and is to be found hi 110 
inconsiderable degree in some of our most picturesque and 
lovely districts, and that a simple question of quantity has pre- 
vented the English diggings from becoming the scenes of the 
same wild extravagance and of very wantonness of riches which 
have characterized those of Bendigo and Ballarat. Such is the 
case, however ; and I will endeavour to show in this paper the 
geological conditions in which this, as any other gold produce, 
is found, and how far it is likely to become another ingredient 
of the permanent mineral wealth of this country. 
Geologists have divided the whole of the rocks of the earth’s 
crust into three portions, viz., Palaeozoic, or Primary, implying 
the first and earliest division, as classified according to the 
fossil inhabitants in it ; 2. Mesozoic, or Secondary, meaning 
the rocks which contain the middle zone of life hi the 
earth’s history ; and 8. Cainozoic, or Tertiary, by which we 
understand the youngest and most modern of the divisions. 
For simplicity’ sake we call them Primary, Secondary, and 
Tertiary, each of which is subdivided into numerous strata 
according to their fossil contents. It would be out of place 
to describe or even to catalogue the whole of these subdivisions, 
