We happen to have before us, at this present moment, a geological map of Nova Scotia. Two such maps have been published, one by Messrs Alger and Jackson, of Boston, and another by Dr Gesner, late colonial geologist for the province of New Brunswick. In these maps the north-western part of the province is skirted by a fringe of old primary rocks, partly metamorphic, and sometimes fossiliferous, and resting on a back ground of igneous rocks, which cover, according to Gesner, the largest portion of this end of the province. Were we inclined to try our hand at a geological prediction, we should counsel our friends in the vale of Annapolis to look out for yellow particles along the course of the Annapolis river, and especially at the mouths and up the beds of the cross streams that descend into the valley from the southern highlands. Nature, indeed, has given the Nova Scotians in this Annapolis valley a miniature of the more famed valley of the Sacramento. Their north and south mountains represent respectively the coast range and the Sierra Nevada of the Sacramento Basin. The tributaries in both valleys descend chiefly from the hills on the left of the main rivers. The Sacramento and the Annapolis rivers both terminate in a lake or basin, and each finally escapes through a narrow chasm in the coast ridge by which its terminating basin communicates with the open sea. The Gut of Digby is, in the small, what the opening into the harbour of San Francisco now called the “Golden Gate” and the “Narrows” is in the large; and if the Sacramento has its plains of drifted sand and gravel, barren and unpropitious to the husbandman, the Annapolis river, besides its other poor lands, on which only the sweet fern luxuriates, has its celebrated Aylesford sand plain, or devil’s goose pasture—a broad flat “given up to the geese, who are so wretched that the foxes won’t eat them, they hurt their teeth so bad.” Then the south mountains, as we have said, consist of old primary rocks, such as may carry gold—disturbed, traversed by dykes, and changed or metamorphosed, as gold-bearing rocks usually are. Whether quartz veins abound in them we cannot tell; but the idle boys of Clare, Digby, Clements, Annapolis, Aylesford, and Horton, may as well keep their eyes about them, and the woodmen, as they hew and float down the pine logs for the supply of the Boston market. A few days spent with a “long Californian Tom,” in rocking the Aylesford and other sands and gravel-drifts of their beautiful valley, may not prove labour in vain. What if the rich alluvials of Horton and Cornwallis should hide beneath more glittering riches, and more suddenly enriching, than the famed crops of which they so justly boast? Geological considerations also suggest that the streams which descend from the northern slopes of the Cobequid Mountains should not be overlooked. It may well be that the name given to Cap d’Or by the early French settlers two hundred years