So-Called Experts

Whose leading principles and divining powers are as dreary, mystifying, and disheartening as the crude, but certainly emphatic declaration contained in the old and well understood mining axiom of "where she be, there she be." Indeed, it is a reproach to this advancing age that science should be almost groping in the dark on the subject, especially when, its importance is to a certain extent recognised by the State through its costly departments, manned with expert power of formidable character and high sounding appendages, but, probably, lacking the all important essential of practical demonstration in nature's great laboratory.

Now, let us see if a remedy can be suggested in New Zealand, and especially on the West Coast, to which portion of the Colony I desire particularly to direct attention, owing to our better Knowledge of it, and to the unusual conditions and difficulties with which miners are confronted. Who, I ask, would be bold enough to assert that prospecting in our dense forests, on our moss covered mountains, in the luxuriant entanglement of nature, is not of a most arduous and difficult character, unprecedented in the history of gold discoveries in the Australasian group? The chances of the individual miner are remote indeed when such formidable drawbacks to prospecting exist, apart from its costliness. Hence on external aid must the prospector rely if ever our mining interests are to be lifted out of their present almost dormant condition. Now, in contemplating this external aid, very little importance need attach to the subsidies as at present doled out by the State, and that derived from private sources, for it is only an unsound policy of frittering away monies on chance circumstances surrounding old goldfields centres. What is required is that a bolder policy should be initiated by the State, of a practical and permanent character, and such as relates to the peculiar conditions of any particular locality.