ard which the import trade converges.

I need not repeat the description given in a previous chapter (Chapter
XVIII) of the Rand mining district. The reader will remember that it
differs from all the other gold-fields of South Africa in one essential
feature--that of the comparative certainty of its yield. Accordingly, in
considering the future of South African gold, I will speak first of
those other gold-fields and then separately of the Rand district.

Gold has been found in many places south of the Zambesi. It occurs here
and there in small quantities in Cape Colony, in somewhat larger
quantities in Natal, Zululand, and Swaziland, in the eastern and
north-eastern districts of the Transvaal, at Tati in northern
Bechuanaland, and in many spots through Matabililand and Mashonaland. In
all (or nearly all) these places it occurs in quartz reefs resembling
those of North America and Australia. Some reefs, especially those of
the northern region between the Limpopo and Zambesi, are promising, and
great quantities of gold have in times long past been taken out of this
region. As already explained (Chapter XVII), it seems probable, though
not certain, that in many districts a mining industry will be developed
which will give employment to thousands, perhaps many thousands, of
natives, and to hundreds, perhaps many hundreds, of white engineers and
foremen. Should this happen, markets will be created in these districts,
land will be cultivated, railways will be made, and the local trades
which a thriving population requires will spring up. But the life of
these gold reefs will not be a long one. As the gold is found in quartz
rock, and only to a small extent in gravel or other alluvial deposits,
the mining requires capital, and will be carried on by companies. It
will be carried on quickly, and so quickly with the aid of the
enormously improved scientific appliances we now possess, as to exhaust
at no distant period the mineral which the rocks contain. I saw in
Transylvania in 1866 a gold mine which was worked in the days of the
Romans, and was being worked still. But mining now is as different from
the mining of the ancients or of the middle ages as a locomotive engine
is from an ox-waggon, such are the resources which chemical and
mechanical science place at our disposal. Accordingly, the payable parts
of the quartz reefs will have been drained of their gold in a few years,
or, at any rate, in a few decades, just as many of t