Let us now travel westward by the railway to Ballarat, which lies on the south face of the narrow ridge which forms the water-parting between the Victorian Valley and the north-western plains. Ballarat is a fine town, second only to Melbourne, and planted in far more picturesque surroundings. Here is Sturt 21 Street, named after one of Australia’s greatest explorers; 22 looking down it we can just see Mount Warrenheit in the distance. We can wander in the Botanical Gardens where the aloe is in 23 flower, or stroll by the lake and admire the black swans. But we have not come here only for the scenery. Ballarat represents the second great factor in the development of Victoria: gold. Within ten years of 1851, when gold was discovered here in paying quantities, all the chief fields of Victoria were opened up, and there was a sudden rush of settlers to the country. Many of the goldfields are so near Melbourne that it may be considered as a centre of mining as well as of pastoral industries. Thus we may account for the fact that it has to-day concentrated in its neighbourhood nearly half of the total population of the State. The gold most easily reached was in the underground leads, the channels of old streams, or fissures in the rock. In these were found nuggets and gold dust. Here we see the primitive methods of mining. A group of miners is sinking a simple shaft and raising 24 the soil in buckets, while another washes it in a pan to separate the heavier gold dust. The pick and shovel and the strong arm 25 of the miner are the chief instruments needed for this form of mining; and the fact that the goldfields are in the midst of fertile country, with farms all around them, makes the life much less hard than in some of the fields of the far interior of Australia which we shall visit later. The modern method of mining is to attack the quartz rock by the aid of machinery; and the shafts are often carried to a great depth. Here, instead of the tents of the miners, we see what might be the top of a coal mine, with elaborate machinery for 26 winding. We shall examine this type of mine elsewhere; for though gold has made Victoria in the past, it is not now the chief gold-producing State in the Commonwealth. So we pass on, after a glance at a quartz reef cropping out from the ground--a sign that 27 has often guided the prospector in his search.