Stawell Gold Field

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	fashion to call those an inch or so wide, or less, "indicators," because the Ballarat East miners noticed that at points where a channel, whose walls were kept apart by a thin seam of mundic, passed into and through an almost flat vein of quartz, masses of almost solid gold were occasionally found ; and this feature led to these narrow, and, on the Ballarat East field, almost vertical, channels of circulation being known as "indicators." Here I must point out once more that the more nearly horizontal the obstruction floor (flat vein) the more nuggety and concentrated the class of the deposit associated with the channel. Where a channel has been widened, forming



	a storage situation just above a very "tight" part on its course, or above where a break in the rocks known as a slide, or a cross-course, has impeded circulation, then, the walls of the channel being almost vertical, the deposit therein from the impeded waters appears distributed in finer particles. This is why we find coarse and nuggety gold in side-vein structure, and gold in finer particles in vertical lodes having book-like internal structure. I noticed around Landsborough very many channels of the narrow type, on several of which patches of gold had been obtained in the decomposed slate near the surface. The patches are on floors running nearly at right angles to the almost vertical passages—floors due to shrinkage in the strata or other causes. Denudation had brought such floors in places to or almost to the surface, but the miners had invariably put their works down throngh the floors, in search of the mythical " big lode, that must be about here somewhere, full of gold." These hard-working men might profitably have prospected these " indicator " formations by the excellent methods of Mr. Joe Wright, of Moonambel, whose operations I noticed in that locality. On the range to the east of the town is a very wide belt of altered slate and sandstone, associated with dyke intrusions and lode formations, on

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