ary of the methods now employed for developing the
rich yield of these deposits may not be out of place in this connection.

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