MINERALS

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On the banks of the Indus, where it still courses
through the mountains and washes the scanty cultivation
 of various Himalayan valleys, I have seen the same
process repeated, with much about the same result ; and
indeed, wherever a river runs down from a central source
of the oldest geological formations, there may almost
certainly be found searchers after gold working on primitive
 methods. It is said that every river in the Punjab
(except the Ravi) contains gold, and certainly there are
few streams that find their sources in the oldest formations
 of the Central Provinces in the basins of the
Mahanadi and the Godavari that are not similarly blessed.
But the gold-bearing sands of rivers do not necessarily
obtain gold from any one abundant source. Gold is
disseminated through a vast mass of geological material,
apart from quartz reefs, which occasionally do not contain
 gold at all. So that the geographical area over which
gold may be found in India is very widespread, and the
sources of it in different districts very various. All along
the foot of the northern hills of India, from Afghanistan
to Assam, gold is found in tertiary deposits ; but it is all
detrital ; it has been washed there from crystalline metamorphic
 sources far away in the Himalayas. In Ladak
quartz reefs occurring in the carboniferous age are the
source of supply ; about Kandahar auriferous reefs belong
to the cretaceous deposits.
Within the peninsular area, the Madras province is
probably the richest in gold. The Wynaad gold mines,
which have been opened up in the rolling plateau which
lies between the Malabar coast districts and the Nilgiris,
are on the site of certain ancient mines which were found
in great abundance—mines which have been sunk with
very considerable engineering skill, and which must have
been worked for centuries. Reports on the gold wealth
of the Wynaad have been intermittently submitted to
Government ever since the beginning of this century, and
so late as 1880 one great authority reported that the reefs
were more numerous, richer and wider there than in any
similar area in Australia. But the gold is found in