In regard to the capacity of the various mines for the regular supply of quartz to the mills, it may be stated that ten tons daily is the average amount fixed upon, by the different experts, as a reasonable quantity to be expected from either of the well-conducted properties.  Works of exploration and of “construction”, such as will hereafter be pointed out, must, it is true, always precede those of extraction; but a very moderate quartz-mill will easily “dress” ten tons of quartz daily, or three thousand tons per annum, requiring the constant labor of thirty men, as shown by the large experience already gained throughout the Province.  And this, says Professor Silliman, “is not a very formidable force for a profitable mine,”—­particularly when we consider that the price of miners’ labor in Nova Scotia rarely rises above the moderate sum of ninety cents per day.

If the quartz cost, to turn its product into gold bars, as high as twenty dollars a ton, there would be, says the same eminent authority, “a deduction of one-fourth [as expense] from the gross gold-product.  The gold is about nine-hundred-and-sixty thousandths fine, and is worth, as already shown, over twenty dollars per ounce.  But the cost of the quartz cannot be so much by one-half as that named above; and there is the additional value of gold from the pyrites and mispickel, as well as probably fifteen per cent, saving on the total amount of gold produced by improved methods of working.”

The reason why so little alluvial gold is to be found throughout this district may be very simply and concisely stated.  It will be observed, that the length of the gold-field lies mainly from east to west, while its width from north to south is over a much less distance, and therefore lies almost at right angles to the scouring and grinding action of the glacial period.  No long Sacramento Valley, stretching away to the south and west of the quartzite upheavals, has here retained and preserved the spoils of those long ages of attrition and denudation.  The alluvial gold has mostly been carried, by the action alluded to, into the sands and beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean; and it is only at the bottom of the numerous little lakes which dot the surface of the country, that the precious metal, in this, its most obvious and attractive form, has ever been found in any remunerative quantity in Nova Scotia.

This statement brings us naturally to the consideration of another of our opening positions, namely, that the gold of Nova Scotia is to be successfully sought only under the application of the most scientific and systematic methods of deep quartz-mining.  That no pains nor expense has been spared by the present promoters of these important enterprises, in the very commencement of their mining-works, will perhaps be sufficiently evident from the fact that no step has been taken without the full advice and concurrence of the eminent mining authorities already cited.  A summary of the methods now employed for developing the rich yield of these deposits may not be out of place in this connection.