GOLD. 97
in localities where, from theoretical considerations, they believed it to exist.
It
is scarcely possible that the non-gold-producing areas in which the
Dekan trap or basalt and the rocks of the Vindhyan formation prevail,
and which aggregate a total area of about one-fourth of the peninsula,
were ever systematically prospected, and for this reason, if for no
other, that the washers, if they were comparable to those of the
present day, could not have devoted months and years to the exploration
of, for them, barren tracts, simply from the fact that they could not
subsist under such circumstances.
By
what means, soever, they were led to select and settle in these
gold-producing tracts, it is certain that within such limits a process
of segregation has been going on towards the richest points.
In
a part of Western Bengal* I found that generations of washers had
demarcated limits within which washing was remunerative, and these
limits corresponded in a striking degree to the well-defined
boundaries between two formations—the metamorphic and the
sub-metamorphic. In the area occupied by the former, gold was not
absent, but its abundance as contrasted with that in the latter I
ascertained, by two independent methods of calculation which are
described below, was in the proportion of i to 3. Hence, as the washers
only managed to eke out a bare subsistence in the sub-metamorphic area,
they confined their operations to it.
The
detailed accounts of Indian gold-producing tracts admit of the
following geographical arrangement, proceeding from south to north :—
* Videiiifra, p. 114. H
