An American expert, Mr. Hamilton Smith, contributes to Tuesday's Times
a very remarkable report on the Witwaters- rand gold-fields, which shows that their richness has not been exaggerated. "There have often," he tells us, " been mines of short length, far richer than those of the Rand, but nothing approaching them has ever been seen so far as regularity and extent are concerned." Yet the area of the gold-field, as a whole, is very small, the basin in which the gold-bearing reefs are to be found being only some eleven miles long. From this basin, however, Mr. Hamilton Smith calculates that there are ninety-seven million tons of gold-bearing quartz still to be won—quartz with a gold-value of 4215,000,000. Oat- aide this district of eleven miles, the veins are still auriferous, and may be calculated as capable of producing enough to bring the total gold in the Witwatersrand fields up to 2325,000,000 in all.
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