Gold Deposits o/i f/ic Istlumts of Pajiarna. — HersJiey. 75 
lies near the southern edge of the treeless and barren foot-hills 
belt, probably twenty miles from the high sierras. The rocks 
of this belt are a complex series of "surface volcanics" water- 
laid tufas, coarse ashes, trap porphyries, basalts, etc., — which 
extend in a broad belt eastward along the southern side of the 
Cordillera de Veraguas, and then adjoining the Pacific ocean 
to the city of Panama, between which and the Culebra cutting 
on the proposed Panama canal, they have been studied by Mr. 
R. T. Hill* and by him named the Panama formation. He 
considers it of Cretaceous age. My own studies, carried on 
independently and without a knowledge of his, tend to place 
it in a later period, probably the Eocene. Certainly, in the 
provinces of Veraguas and Code, go to 150 miles west of Pan- 
ama, a fossiliferous late Cretaceous formation is separated from 
an overlying series of purple conglomerate, red sandstone and 
red shale, by an erosion unconformity of no mean value; and 
the red series (apparently Eocene) was clearly observed to 
pass under the white and gray, water-laid, rhyolitic tufas of the 
Panama series. I shall, therefore, consider the formations of 
the Remanse gold-belt as most probably of Eocene age. 
The representative mine of this belt is that known as the 
Remanse, owned and operated by an English company. In a 
space of perhaps one-fourth square mile, there is one main vein, 
four to fifteen feet in width, and as much as ten smaller veins or 
stringers to the main ledge, each of which is capable of consti- 
tuting a paying mine. The main vein is straight, nearly verti- 
cal, has been penetrated at a depth of 600 feet beneath the sur- 
face and contains white quartz with little or no sulphurets, but 
an average gold content of $16 per ton. To me the curious 
features of this mine are, that the main vein is connected with 
a horizontal fault, and that the enclosing walls are white, com- 
pact, fine-grained, water-laid tufa, macroscopically resembling 
chalk. The American miner will easily recognize the rather 
unusual conditions here, namely, a gold-bearing vein of quartz 
cutting a soft volcanic ash of Tertiary age. 
Fifteen miles farther west, at Canazas, the gold veins are in 
a variety of rock types, sometimes a tufa, but oftener a gray, 
crystalline, volcanic rock of somewhat doubtful mode of form- 
*Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, at Harvard Col- 
lege, vol. XXVIII, No. 5. 
