THE SCOPE OF ECONOMIC GEOLOGY 13 
the material above the bedrock has been worked out the 
Mine has reached its end as surely as striking a reef is fatal 
"0a ship at sea. Hence the Australian miners referred to the 
Yarren rock beneath the gold-bearing deposits as the reef, 
ind the term is still so used in alluvial mining. In some 
Mining fields it has come to mean the opposite ; for after the 
lluvig] deposit had been worked out the miners searched 
for the source of its gold in the quartz-veins in the bedrock ; 
they distinguished these veins of quartz from the pebbles of 
Hluvia] quartz as * quartz in the reef or *' reef-quartz, 
Which were in time abridged or reversed to quartz-reef. 
The long-established term for ore-veins is lode, which has 
been used in Cornwall, and by Chaucep and Shakespeare. 
The worg has the same origin as ** to lead ” and as *“ leet,” a 
*hanne] of water. A lode leads the miner along the course 
of the ore, When gold mining began in California in 1849 
the term lode was adopted and is still used there, as in *“ the 
Great Mother Lode.” The equivalent term in German is 
8ang" from the verb to go, and has the same meaning. 
ln South Africa, on the other hand, the term reef was adopted 
for the lodes, instead of for the country rock, and this practice 
has been extended in recent years. In some fields the term 
‘ef has been used in the two opposite senses, for bedrock 
0 regard to the alluvial deposits, where the “* reef drive ” is 
the main drive through the bedrock ; while lodes in the 
bedrock gre known as ‘‘reefs.” It would be well, where 
local Practice permits, to retain lode for sheets of ore, and reef 
"1 1tS original meaning for bedrock.