Gold in British Guiana, its History and Prospects. 
1 Guiana whose great city Geryon's sons 
Call El Dorado." 
By Hope Hunter* 
jT has been well observed that as the world grows 
older the gifts of nature are held in higher 
esteem, and nowhere could we find an apter 
illustration of this truth than in the increasing attention 
now being given to the Gold-fields of the Guianas. In 
the palmy days of slave-grown produce, a beneficent 
nature showered riches upon the colonist with a prodigal 
hand which left him but little to be desired, and no care 
or anxiety in life beyond the determination of that par- 
ticular variety of tropical production which might most 
readily realise the wealth which was the objecl: of his 
desires. Coffee for a time shared its domain with cotton, 
but later both had to retire from the field before the 
advance of the all-powerful King Sugar, which till within 
the present decade ruled supreme, the autocrat of in- 
dustries. In the days when TROLLOPE described the 
government of the country as " a mild despotism tem- 
pered by sugar," or more recently still, when Mr. Pal- 
GRAVE writing of the sister colony, savagely asseverated 
* ( the first man who brings in the news of remunerative 
gold-fields ought to have from the colony a rope for his 
reward, and if it silences his voice before he has time to 
make his discovery public so much the better," it would 
have needed the courage of an Ajax to have raised the 
impious question whether the lands of Guiana could have 
