is a nice operation, requiring constant attention.
Quartz requires a mill and water-power; placer dirt is washed in a
simple sluice. Dirt containing ten cents in the cubic yard may pay the
hydraulic miner, but the quartz miner must have a hundred times as much
in a cubic yard of vein stone, or he cannot work. The placer gold, when
freed from the baser material surrounding it, is much of it in coarse
particles, which are easily caught by their specific gravity; the
quartz gold must be reduced to a fine powder before it be set free from
its gangue, and with the fineness of the particles increases the
difficulty of catching them.

Auriferous quartz lodes are often found by accident. Not unfrequently
it happens that a rich streak of pay-dirt in a placer claim is followed
up to the quartz vein from which it came. While miners are out walking
or hunting, they occasionally will come upon lodes in which the gold is
seen sparkling. Some good leads have been found by men employed in
making roads and cutting ditches. The quartz might be covered with
soil, but the pick and shovel revealed its position and wealth. In
Tuolumne county in 1858, a hunter shot a grizzly bear on the side of a
steep _canon_, and the animal tumbling down, was caught by a projecting
point of rock. The hunter followed his game, and while skinning the
animal, discovered that the point of rock was auriferous quartz. In
Mariposa county, in 1855, a robber attacked a miner, and the latter saw
the rock behind his assailant sparkle in the sunlight, at a spot where
a bullet struck a wall of rock. He killed the robber, and found that
the rock was gold-bearing quartz. In Nevada county, several years ago,
a couple of unfortunate miners who had prepared to leave California,
and were out on a drunken frolic, started a large boulder down a steep
hill. On its way down, it struck a brown rock and broke a portion of it
off--exposing a vein of white quartz which proved to be auriferous,
induced the disappointed miners to remain some months longer in the
state, and paid them well for remaining. Science and experience do not
appear to give much assistance in prospecting for quartz lodes.
Chemists, geologists, mineralogists and old miners, have not done
better than ignorant men and new-comers. Most of the best veins have
been discovered by poor and ignorant men. Not one has been found by a
man of high education as a miner or geologist. No doubt geological
knowledge is valuable to