have threatened to become a part of the game
which the great powers of Europe are playing on the chessboard of the
world.

It is believed that the banket or conglomerate beds are of marine
origin, but it does not follow that the gold was deposited _pari passu_
with the deposition of the beds, for it may have been--and skilled
opinion inclines to this view--carried into the conglomerate seams
subsequently to their deposit. In this respect they resemble auriferous
veins of quartz, though in these banket reefs the gold-bearing solutions
would seem to have come up through the interstitial spaces of the
conglomerate instead of in the more or less open fissures of the
gold-bearing quartz-veins. The chemical conditions under which gold is
thus deposited are still conjectural. Gold has long been known to exist
in sea-water, in the form of an iodide or a chloride; and one skilful
metallurgist at Johannesburg told me that he believed there was as much
gold in a cubic mile of sea-water as the whole then annual output of
the Rand, that is to say, nearly L8,000,000.

Had these deposits been discovered a century ago, few, if any of them,
would have been worth working, because miners did not then possess the
necessary means for extracting the gold from its intractable matrix. It
is the progress of chemical science which, by inventing new processes,
such as the roasting with chlorine, the treatment in vats with cyanide,
and the application of electrical currents, has made the working
profitable. The expenses of working out the gold per ton of ore sank
from L1 15_s._ 5_d._ per ton in 1892 to L1 8_s._ 1_d._ in 1898, while
the dividends rose from 8_s._ per ton to 13_s._ 2_d._; and the
proportion of gold won which was paid in dividends rose from 19 to 32
per cent. Further improvements in the processes of reduction will
doubtless increase the mining area, by making it worth while to develop
mines where the percentage of metal to rock is now too small to yield a
dividend. Improvements, moreover, tend to accelerate the rate of
production, and thereby to shorten the life of the mines; for the more
profitable working becomes, the greater is the temptation to work as
fast as possible and get out the maximum of ore. The number of stamps at
work in milling the ore rose from 3740 in 1896 to 5970 in August, 1899.
The total sum annually paid in dividends, which had in 1892 been
L794,464, had in 1898 risen to L4,847,505.

The duration of the mines