CASSEL GOLD EXTRACTING COMPANY (LIMITED.)

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 9490, 20 April 1894, Page 6

CASSEL GOLD EXTRACTING COMPANY (LIMITED.)

TWO YEARS' WORK BY THE Mo-ARTHUR-FORREST PROCESS. GREAT NEW ZEALAND SUCCESS. In the Australian Mining Standard of the 31st March wo noticed the following significant remarks :— What a pity it is that some systematic effort is not made to give us the benefit of the cyanide process of treating tailings. There are immense quantities of tailings in different parts of the colonies that ought to pay well for treatment, and although we may not achieve anything like the wonderful results attained in South Africa, we ought to be able to recover an appreciable quantity of the gold which has been allowed to flow away owing to poorly equipped batteries or to special difficulties in the way of saving fine gold. The Witwatersrand mines are . now getting nearly 40,0000z of gold per month from tailing, and some of the companies put through malfy thousands of, tons of stuff every week and make a handsome thing out of the sdwt average return. As we in New Zealand are supposed to be enjoying these very benefits, the absence of which our Sydney contemporary is bewailing, we despatched a representative to make inquiries as to the results accruing from the introduction of the McArthur-Forrest process into the colony. Very few indeed, even amongst those most intimately connected with the mining industry, are aware of the great extent to which the cyanide process has been adopted, or the important factor which ib has become in the gold production of the colony. It will be remembered that two years ago, when the Cassel Company commenced to pursue a more energetic policy, the Crown at Karangahake, and the Sylvia at Tararu, were the only mines using the process. The former possessed a small planb in connection with their Lamberton Mills, but when they decided on erecting their present magnificent plant,-they suspended , operations. The Sylvia Company stopped altogether, so that literally there was nob a single mine in the colony using the Cassel process. In addition to this, the validity of the patents was loudly attacked by Mr. Bohm, who was then erecting a plant for treatment by cyanide at the Waihi Company's works. But now, in two short years, Mr. Bohm has disappeared, his plant has been torn up, and the Waihi Company is the largest licensee and producer in New Zealand, and every mine with a plant of any size outside the one district, the Thames (where the process has not yet been introduced generally), is a licensee and producer and all the new mining companies recently floated — the Golden Cross, the Grace Darling, and the Kapai-Vermont, are erecting plants. Of course its greatest development has been in the Upper Thames districts in the treatment of the refractory ores, for which it has proved its thorough adequacy, and Kuaotunu owes its present existence as a goldfield to the Mc Arthur-Forrest process, which has produced for last month more than 60 per cent, of the gold output of the district, whilst in Waihi, Komata, and Karangahake it is supreme, nearly two-thirds of the total gold production of these districts being due to the same agency ; and when the plants at the Waihi and Golden Cross are completed, as they will be at the end of the mouth, about 90 per cent, of the whole of the Upper Thames production, and two-thirds of the gold output for the whole of the North Island of New Zealand, should be due to cyanide. We have to congratulate the Cassel Company on the success attained, but above all we have to congratulate the mineowners on the introduction of a process of gold-saving which has enabled them to release from the ores the highest percentage of the gold and silver contained in them, thus making several of them which had previously been worked at a loss to be now sources of profit, enabling the directors in many instances to pay dividends, instead of, as they had to do previously, carry on operations on calls made on the unfortunate shareholders.