MINING IN OTAGO AND VICTORIA COMPARED.

Otago Witness, Issue 1466, 20 December 1879, Page 19

MINING IN OTAGO AND VICTORIA COMPARED.

Our mineral eouutry is mostly^ mountain ranges of great elevation, broken into deep gullies with sides of high angles, thus exposing the gold-bearing Blate over large tracts of country. Where quartz veins come to the surface they can be seen and easily prospected — another favourable feature in our quartz - lodes. Many of them are what miners call crosscountry reafs — that if, veins running at right angles to the direction of the range or hill. This class of retfa can be worked with great economy of labour, and free from water. Victoria being comparatively a level country, the gold bearing elevations of Sandhurst and Pleasant Creek rise, only a few hundred feet above the surrounding country, so that all tests have to be done by shafts, and where water is in quantity in the ground, work be comes very slow and expensive, as the above will Bbow. Nature has done for us what cost the Victorian miner time and money. Take someff the Macetown reefs: they are about 3000 feet above the valleys, and 5700 feet above the sea, cutting through the slate rock at various angles to the bedding, exposing large bodies of quartz on the surface, generally showing gold. . Those reefs are often rejected by the working miner on account of their elevation, the long winter, and the cost of getting quartz to the low ground; but as a speculation^ I think they have no equal, if rich in gold with strong reef— aay over three feet thick. The cost of testing is about the same aa on the low ground, and wire tramways could take stone to the mill as cheaply an horsea and drays over uneven ground. In such districts water is usually found for a motive power. When the mine is once opened by tunnels, work can be continued summer and winter, except when frost stops the battery. From my knowledge of the country I could point to many quarfz : lodes coming to the surface at high elevations that could be cheaply tested, if parties would get hones);' workmen, and stick "together, and make up, their minds'not to, spend a shilling on machinery until they were certain that the mine. could pay for.it. Our quartz-mining industry 'has been' blas'od" by parties'erecting machinery on the faith of a few specks of gold in some pounds of picked stone crushed in; a mortar, which always, give results above the, general yield of the, mine, and are sometimes tampered with- Many of the richest mines 6f California am 4000 to 6000 feec above the sea.' Let us use the same caution as in ordinary business in developing the mineral veins, and the result will be a benefit to ourselves and tlie country. Place very little value on a miners statement of the richness of a lode. He may have been working for years out of luck;' the colour of ' gold fires hit imagination and' warps his judgment, although quite honest. There is .another class of miners with cooler heads, when ihey come on good prospects stop' work for fear the patch may run out, and try to sell their shares. Both c'l»3aes are daageroui to the speculator. •••'•■ The advantages we have over Viotoria may be summed up as under : Reefs easily discovered and proven, cheap motive power, tunnellingior ' shAfto, Ac. Oar^disadvautftgea "are : x CoBt of bringing machinery on to the mine, and a little extra cost for mining timber, which will get as the mines get opened up and the roads improved. „ '< > I