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would have been just as well justified as the sinking of the 300 ft. of shaft at the end of the adit. Although prospecting of this nature may have been advisable when the level was open, it is very questionable, however, if it could be recommended now: present-day mining costs are too high to justify ventures having in them such a large element of chance.

This series occurs about two miles northerly from the Capleston groups, and was discovered in 1872 by Francis Walker. Only two mines calling for any mention were opened on it, the Italian Gully and the Garibaldi.

Italian Gully Mine.—Prospecting by means of four adits showed that in this property there was a shoot of stone about 500 ft. in length but of narrow width. In one place it opened out to 3ft., but it only averaged from 6 in. to 8 in. The Italian Gully Gold-mining Company was formed, shortly after the discovery, to work the find. For several years only prospecting was done, but in 1876 the company erected a five-stamp battery and commenced crushing. Small parcels of quartz were treated thereafter for some years, but the returns were not satisfactory, and in 1878 another company, the Golden Arch, purchased the claim. During the time the original company operated the mine 897 tons of stone were crushed, for a yield of 512 oz. gold, valued at £1,984. The new company carried on prospecting and crushing intermittently till 1883, when it let the mine on tribute. During its tenure as owner the Golden Arch Company appears to have crushed 149 tons of quartz, for a yield of 139 oz. gold, but there is no record available as to the amount of stone mined and treated by the tribute party. In 1884 the ground was abandoned, and, although a little prospecting seems to have been continued in the locality in the intervening period, no further attempt was made to work the mine till 1905, when Knight and party (afterwards known as the Buller United Syndicate) reopened the old No. 4 adit and re-equipped the mine with another five-stamp battery, which they erected near the mouth of the adit (the previous battery was on Raglan Creek). It may be mentioned that the three upper adits had been driven wholly on the reef, but No. 4 crossed the country for several hundred feet before reaching the vein. About 100 ft. south of where the crosscut intersected the reef the latter had been cut off by a fault. Knight and party, in 1907, ran a crosscut out near this fault and located the reef again, 100 ft. to the westward. Following the reef southward from where it was picked up, other displacements were found to occur, shifting the stone each time to the west, and the large amount of deadwork necessitated by these breaks, combined with the smallness of the reef and the hardness of the walls, made it difficult to operate the mine at a profit. In 1908 the Buller United Syndicate disposed of the claim to a new Golden Arch Company, which erected a ten-stamp battery, as well as a cyanide plant, and carried out some further prospecting; but, although reef was going underfoot in the adit and was showing in both ends of No. 4, it was found impossible to work profitably, and the property was again let to tributers, who operated it for several years with a moderate degree of success.

From the time when Knight and party took over the claim in 1905 until the second Golden Arch Company went into liquidation in 1911 a further 576 tons of quartz were crushed, for a yield of 433 oz. 19 dwt. 6 gr. gold, valued at £1,632. Another small crushing of 22 tons was reported in 1913, which yielded 7 oz. 19 dwt. gold, valued at £31 2s. 6d. Thus the total quartz