The ill-considered system of allotting small individual claims, at first adopted by the Colonial Government, was founded, probably, on a want of exact knowledge of the peculiar nature of the gold-district, and the consequent expectation that the experiences of California and Australia, in panning and washing, were to be repeated here.  This totally inapplicable system in a manner compelled the early single adventurers to abandon their claims, as soon as the surface-water began to accumulate in their little open pits or shallow levels, beyond the control of a single bucket, or other such primitive contrivance for bailing.  Even the more active and industrious digger soon found his own difficulties to accumulate just in proportion to his own superior measure of activity; since, as soon as he carried his own excavation a foot or two deeper than his neighbor’s, he found that it only gave him the privilege of draining for the whole of the less enterprising diggers, whose pits had not been sunk to the same level as his own.  Thus the adventurers who should ordinarily have been the most successful were soon drowned out by the accumulated waters from the adjacent, and sometimes abandoned, claims.  Nearly all of these early efforts at individual mining are now discontinued, and the claims, thus shown to be worthless in single hands, have been consolidated in the large companies, who alone possess the means to work them with unity and success.

The present methods of working the lodes, as now practised in Nova Scotia, proceed on a very different plan.  Shafts are sunk at intervals of about three hundred feet on the course of the lodes which it is proposed to work,—­as these are distinctly traced on the surface of the ground.  When these shafts have been carried down to the depth of sixty feet,—­or, in miners’ language, ten fathoms,—­horizontal drifts or levels are pushed out from them, below the ground, and in either direction, still keeping on the course of the lode.  Whilst these subterranean levels are being thus extended, the shafts are again to be continued downwards, until the depth of twenty fathoms, or one hundred and twenty feet, has been attained.  A second and lower set of levels are then pushed out beneath and parallel to the first named.  At the depth of thirty fathoms, a third and still lower set of levels will extend beneath and parallel to the second.  This work of sinking vertical shafts, and excavating horizontal levels to connect them, belongs to what is denominated the “construction of the mine”, and it is only after this has been completed that the work of mining proper can be said to begin.