deposit will always be on the side of the bank presented to the descending stream.  The metal in such digging is almost invariably found in small spangles, that appear to have been granular particles crushed or rolled flat by some enormous pressure.  In California, these spangles were the beginning of the gold-finding.  When the streams and their banks were well searched, the crowds of adventurers tried, in desperation, what they could do by digging deep holes in the plains; and there the metal was found in such different forms as to indicate quite a different process of deposition.  Some of these holes were productive—­although it was severe labour to dig fifteen or eighteen feet through a hard soil merely as an experiment; and in the course of time the plains were covered with tents.  The influx of adventurers continued; and the old diggers, dissatisfied with gains that seemed to the new prodigious, retired further and further back, and began to grope in the terraces on the sides of volcanic hills, and among the detritus of extinct craters.  Here the harvest was rich, and as the crowning effort of the gold-passion, unassisted by machinery, they actually in some cases cut away the sides of the hills!  ‘My own impression is,’ concludes our informant on this subject, ’that, both in California and Australia, the chances of individual enterprise, and even of small companies, are decreasing rapidly; but that when the mines so wrought have ceased to pay, capital and machinery, directed by science, will receive profitable employment for ages to come.’

The wash-pan we have mentioned may be of tin, if not required to be used with quicksilver, otherwise of copper or wood; but of whatever material made, it should be some 15 inches in diameter at the top, 10 or 11 at the bottom, and 5, or 5-1/2 inches deep.  The manner of using this is learned only by practice and observation, and consists in a peculiar motion, by which the heavier substances sink to the bottom and remain there, while the soluble and lighter parts are washed out.  The principal use of the wash-pan is in rewashing the partially washed ‘stuff’ taken from the rocker, and in prospecting to ascertain by trial the value of a new place.

This rocker, or cradle, may be made of half-inch softwood, and consists of a trough 10 inches deep, 18 inches broad, and 4 feet long, closed at the broad end, and open at the other; with a transverse bar at the upper part, two feet from the broad end, to receive the tray.  This machine is placed on rockers, like a cradle, and deposited so near the water that, when at work, the man who rocks with his left hand may be able to reach the water with a small tin baler, provided with a wooden handle two feet long.  A bucketful of the earth to be washed is thrown into the tray, and the person who is to rock the cradle taking a balerful of water, throws it uniformly on the mass in the tray, and keeps rocking and washing till the gold becomes obvious.  These are the simpler implements of