the valley, and soon their camps were spread all up and down the Vaal River. The separation of the diamonds from the gravel was at first performed by hand panning, after the method of the Brazilian and Indian miners; but after a time a piece of apparatus consisting of a long box with a sieve bottom, mounted so that it could be swung back and forth, came into use. This was called sometimes a "baby" and sometimes a " cradle." The meshes of the sieve were of such size as to allow the fine refuse to pass through, while the medium-sized pebbles likely to contain diamonds were retained and rolled into a tub. The contents of the latter after shaking were turned upon a " sorting table" and the diamonds picked out by careful scraping. By use of this apparatus a larger quantity of the gravel could be shaken at a time with less labor. In this way large areas of the gravel beds of the valley were sorted over for diamonds. It soon appeared, however, that though the extent of the diamond - bearing gravels was great in area it was small in depth, and though large numbers of men found profitable employment there for a time, if no other source of supply had appeared diamond-mining in South Africa would probably long ago have been a thing of the past. But in August, 1870, a farm overseer by the name of De Klerk, living at Ja-gersfontein, having learned that diamonds were usually accompanied in the river diggings by garnets, and having found some of the latter on his farm, went to work with a common wire sieve, and at a depth of six feet found a fine diamond of 50 carats. A month later a similar discovery was made at the place now called Kimberley, and further and deeper digging only disclosed more and more of the diamonds. The news of these discoveries spread rapidly, and soon the farms on which the diamonds had been found were staked out in claims by hordes of diamond diggers. The returns from the diggings proved profitable; but the diamond-bearing areas were so small that the intri­cacy of the claims within them became a serious matter. At first roads were left by common consent between the claims to provide means of transportation and places for work, as shown in the accompanying view of the Kimberley mines in 1872; but as the roads were too full of diamonds to be spared, they were in time cut away, and the plan was adopted of removing the diamond-bearing earth by means of cars carried by long wire ropes to the surface. Each claim or owner had his own system of pulleys, and the mines soon came to look as if covered by a vast spider's web. In ] 885, within an area of seventy acres, at Kim­berley forty-two companies and fifty-six private firms or individuals were working. As the diggings grew deeper the situation became 81