III.—What May the Future be Expected to Disclose?

I may answer this in one sentence: It may be expected to page 18 disclose where the gold which has been cut out of the mountains and distributed in the drifts, from glaciers and rivers, has got to Hill tops, terraces, old and new, river beds, old and new, lake beds old and new, will yet yield up immense quantities of the precious metal to the intelligent miner, to say nothing whatever of our quartz lodes, which exist in great numbers and great richness all through our schist mountains. The £18,000,000 worth of gold we have already got is, so to speak, but a certificate of the great richness of the parent rock—there is plenty more where that came from. We have only got samples as yet, here and there from the surface, and if we think of the vast quantities of gold which have been washed out to sea through thousands of years, what must have been the wealth of the rocks which have been squandering gold for ages, and still leave us plenty to spend? We cannot break that bank—its riches are practically inexhaustible; the only difficulty we have is to induce it to honour our drafts. But having discovered where the gold has got to, I think we shall soon discover how to get it out of its hiding places. I believe the future will disclose far more gold than we yet dream of, but not without losses and disappointments. On the average, the return to the miner is not greater than to the agriculturist; but the world has need of gold as it has need of corn, and as a great deal of our mining can be done above ground and in the light of day, and the miner can not live in his hut fairly comfortably on about ten shillings a week, I wonder many more do not turn their attention to this fascinating pursuit. It seems the design of Providence that no community should grow even moderately rich without "labour and thought, and skill and persistence," but I believe few peoples in the world have a finer inheritance than we have in this wonderful country, which, while it supports on the surface its flocks and herds, and displays its little hills and valley waving with corn, contains metals of the most precious character down fathoms deep in its valleys, and up up to its high mountain tops, and in the hearts of these mountains themselves, to be hereafter secured for the uses of man. I have spoken to you hitherto mainly of gold, but we have recently made important discoveries of tin and manganese and we are known to have in various parts of New Zealand silver platinum, mercury, lead, zinc, titanium, tungsten, antimony, copper chrome, nickel, graphite, magnesium, in ores of greater or less richness and heaven knows what besides, as all our West Coast ranges have yet to be explored. But time would fail me to speak of all these. Year by year fresh uses are being found for, and fresh means of utilising many of these valuable metals. Only recently means are said to have been discovered of producing at a less cost that valuable metal aluminum, of which our very clays and slates contain vast quantities the form of oxides; and this metal may hereafter become as common as some of our cheaper and less durable metals are at present. The manganese which I produce is an exceedingly rich peroxide, of which there are thousands of tons at Taieri Mouth, now just beginning to be worked.

I have now come to my last head, which is—