Nov., 1891. 
ORES FROM NEW SOUTH WALES. 
259 
of copper ore, and £182 of gold quartz, making a total of 
£1,001,848. 
This must have been very largely increased in 1889. for the 
returns in the Sydney papers for the last three weeks of the 
year amount to £48,293, £47,353, and £38,295 respectively. 
By the way, the weather is spoken of on December 14th as 
very warm, the thermometer registering 104° to 108° in the 
shade. 
To appreciate the place of these hills in the physiography 
of Australia, we may remember that the eastern coast of 
the continent is bordered at a distance varying from forty or 
fifty to 120 miles by an almost continuous chain of mountains 
principally composed of granite and allied rocks, which cul¬ 
minates in the extreme south of New South Wales in Mount 
Kosciusko, the highest summit known in Australia. The granite 
is pierced with many dykes and sheets of basalt, and the whole 
of these ranges are highly metalliferous. In Queensland we 
have Charters Towers in the north, Gympie in the south, and 
many others. In New South Wales the Bathurst Gold¬ 
field, and many others. Diamonds and other gems also 
occur in fairly considerable quantity, but the difficulties 
of the country prevent them having, at present, much 
commercial value. 
Beyond these ranges we have plateaux and downs in the 
north, bounded on the west by another midrib of hill 
ranges which runs southward from the Gulf of Carpentaria 
for about 250 miles, and there branches off to the east, 
giving off again ranges which run south, forming the sub¬ 
ordinate watersheds of the borders of Queensland and New 
South Wales. South of these are the great rivers the Darling 
and the Murray, with their affluents, which together dram 
all the colony of New South Wales west of the Coast Range, 
and form a river system of first-class magnitude. The 
Barrier Ranges are the furthest south and west extensions of 
the watershed ranges mentioned above. 
The rocks are mostly mica schists, clay slates, and sand¬ 
stones, with numerous quartz reefs and intrusive masses 
and dykes of coarse-grained granite and diorite. Nearly all 
the lodes are in the mica schist, and have been proved over 
a district seventy miles long by thirty wide. They are very 
inconstant in thickness and extent : a surface plan resembles 
the cracks in a dried piece of cross-grained wood, and probably 
their origin is the shrinkage caused by the intrusion of the 
crystalline rocks. Borne of the lodes appear to be in joints 
