THE RAND’S ROMANTIC STORY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3102, 27 August 1913, Page 75

THE RAND’S ROMANTIC STORY.

HOW THE GOLD REEF CAME INTO BEING THE INLAND SEA WHICH CRADLED THE GOLD. “Sir Lionel Phillips is one of the shrewdest and most successful among the giants of the South African gold-mining industry; but lie has not parted with his imagination, and in a lecture on the Romance of the Rand, tp the National Society at Capetown, he so contrived that in the minds of his audience the marvelous completely dominated the sordid,” says The Times correspondent in sending an account of this most interesting lecture.

The Ridge of the White Waters is really a most wonderful place, and a most Wonderful ]possession, not only from the point of view of material wealth, bub from the geological point of view,’ said Sir Lionel. “ ‘Let us imagine a of time so far back as to be really unimaginable. In the dim past the Witwatersrand was an inland sea, and this sea, which was enclosed no doubt by mountains, played about against the bills and tore them down gradually, and deposited them on the bottom, not in thin layers, but deposited those rocks to a depth of over four and a-half miles. That was the origin of the Witwatersrand. After this deposition took place there was an upheaval from below. The Rand extends for something like 60 miles in length. The inland sea tt> which I referred was very much larger f but we only know the portion of it that is mineralised. —A Titan in Nature’s Laboratory.— “ ‘You can imagine the force from below which was powerful enough to turn up the whole of that country, and which did not turn it up in the same way as it would turn up in a book, but which broke it into fragments. Consequently we do not find one direct line of reef; but we find them in fragments. Perhaps between . each break you may find a distance of a mile or half a mile. At the time this upheaval took place, of course, the whole of the earth’s surface was cracked, and through those cracks came up plutonic rocks—molten rocks, —and after them came up fumes—gold in a gaseous state. These rocks brought up solutions or vapours containing the gold. “ 'No doubt these vapours were chemically associated when they pame up, possibly with chlorine. We have a great deal of sulphide of iron, which we find in the rock to-day. The chlorine would cling to the gold ; but as it has a greater affinity for iron it leaves the gold and clings to the iron, and that leaves the gold free in the rock.’ “Sir Lionel Phillips went on to show how the fact that the gold was deposited under water gave it an extraordinary permanent nature. They did find difference of value; but on the whole the gold was very evenly deposited, which was a feature of tremendous advantage to the country. —Three Hundred and Fifty-nine Millions Sterling Mined. — “Having thus described how in the dark hack ages and abysm of time the Titan in Nature’s laboratory prepared ms ground. Sir Lionel Phillips passed to the scarcely less Titanic operations of the engineers and chemists of to-day. .Since the goldfields were discovered something like 359 millions sterling have been extracted from 208 million tons of rock torn from the bowels of the earth. “If you take the 208 million tons and bring them into cubic feet, and then consider" a railway tunnel, say. 14ft high and 10ft wide, you can get a tunnel from. Capetown to Khartoum to represent the amount of ore crushed on the Witwatersrand —a tunnel 3400 miles in length. That even does not cover the whole of the energy that has been exercised, because, of course, in addition to the tons actually crushed, a large amount of waste material has been excavated from the earth. “Sir Lionel Phillips calculates that the end pf the century will not see the Rand mines exhauster}. The rise in temperature as you descend is so slow in those mines as compared with what is renerally found in other parts of the world that work will probably be possible up to 7000 ft or 8000 ft vertical. —A Year’s Gold.— “The economic consequences of the industry both to South Africa and t<-< the world” are difficult to estimate in all their ramifications. Sir Lionel summed them up statistically for one year (1912) by saying that £37,000,000 worth of gold hod been, produced. Of that £37,000,000 £13,555,000 had been paid in wages, £7.865,000 going to Europeans, of whom 23,418 were employed Wl the mines, and £5.691.000 to coloured peccjie, of whom 193,341 were employed. These wages were distributed to the traders, and went towards the sustenance of the population, filtering through the whole of the country.

‘' J n stores consumed on the mines and for the working of the mines, including coal, £9,753,000 went. They were all purchased through local people, and therefore formed the trade of the Witwatersrand. These two items made up £23,300,000, and in addition to that about £5,800,000 was spent in developing either existing mines or opening up anything new, which left a balance of £6,G00,000 paid in dividends. So, roughly, but of 37 millions sterling 29 millions remained in the country. The proportion left for the oversea investor will probably not bo regarded by that sanguine person as excessive : but, nevertheless, it is a potent lure.”