The ordinary non-scientific digger will do well to give credence to this view of the case, and will often thereby save himself much useless trouble.  Sometimes also the alluvial gold, coarser in size than true reef-born alluvial, is derived almost in situ from small quartz “leaders,” or veins, which the grinding down of the face of the slates has exposed; these leaders in time being also broken and worn, set free the gold they have contained, which does not, as a rule, travel far, but sometimes becomes water-worn by the rubbing over it of the disintegrated fragments of rock.

But the heavy, true alluvial gold, in great pure masses, mammillary, or botryoidal (like a bunch of grapes) in shape, have assuredly been formed by accretion on some metallic base, from gold salts in solution, probably chloride, but possibly sulphide.

Nuggets, properly so-called, are never found in quartz lodes; but, as will be shown later, a true nugget having all the characteristics of so-called water-worn alluvial may be artificially formed on a small piece of galena, or pyrites, by simply suspending the base metal by a thread in a vessel containing a weak solution of chloride of gold in which a few hard-wood chips are thrown.

Prospecting for alluvial gold at shallow depths is a comparatively easy process, requiring no great amount of technical knowledge.  Usually the first gold is got at or near the surface and then traced to deep leads, if such exist.

At Mount Brown Goldfield, N.S.W., in 1881, I saw claimholders turning out to work equipped only with a small broom made of twigs and a tin dish.  With the broom they carefully swept out the crevices of the decomposed slate as it was exposed on the surface, and putting the resulting dust and fragments into the tin dish proceeded to dry blow it.

The modus operandi is as follows:  The operator takes the dish about half full of dirt, and standing with his back or side to the wind, if there be any, begins throwing the stuff up and catching it, or sometimes slowly pouring it from one dish to another, the wind in either case carrying away the finer particles.  He then proceeds to reduce the quantity by carefully extracting the larger fragments of rock, till eventually he has only a handful or so of moderately fine “dirt” which contains any gold there may be.  If in good sized nuggets it is picked out, if in smaller pieces or fine grains the digger slowly blows the sand and dust aside with his breath, leaving the gold exposed.  This process is both tedious and unhealthy, and of course can only be carried out with very dry surface dirt.  The stuff in which the gold occurred at Mount Brown was composed of broken slate with a few angular fragments of quartz.  Yet, strange to say, the gold was invariably waterworn in appearance.

Dry blowing is now much in vogue on the West Australian fields owing to the scarcity of water; but the great objection is first, the large amount of dust the unfortunate dry blower has to carry about his person, and secondly, that the peck of dirt which is supposed to last most men a life time has to be made a continuous meal of every day.