The discovery of the rich silver deposits at Long’s Lake, now Cobalt, was made by contractors engaged in building the Timiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway. About a month later—so the story goes—a blacksmith, La Rose, flung his hammer at an impudent fox. The missile struck a rock and made a bright metallic streak, which led to another great find. Not quite at once was the public persuaded of the value of these discoveries; then there was a mad rush to prospect for silver; and a town sprang up, looking, it is said, as if its makeshift houses had been “built between darkness and dawn.” An Indian is credited with the finding of gold-bearing quartz on the shores of Larder lake. Years earlier, in 1884, the vast deposits of nickel a few miles west of Sudbury were cut into by the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, but there the mineral which first attracted attention was copper. This was sent to be smelted in New Jersey, and it was only when experts detected the presence of nickel in the slag that the true value of the Sudbury mines was recognized. The forests of Ontario are of vast importance, and promise to remain so. It is satisfactory to add that the state owns the forests, to a large extent, in Ontario (as in Quebec), and the expenses of the provincial government are met by the revenues from the Crown lands and the Dominion subsidy without the need of laying a cent of taxation upon the people. Of course, whether they realize it or not, the indirect taxes, which are collected by the Dominion government, come out of their pockets, and there are municipal taxes, the weight of which varies very much in different municipalities, being naturally much heavier in the cities than in the country. But to return to the forests. Including about one hundred thousand square miles of woodlands in the new district of Patricia, which is only partially explored, the total forest area of Ontario is estimated at 202,000 square miles. Of this about twenty thousand square miles is under licence, and in 1912 the revenue from the forests amounted to considerably over $2,000,000 (£410,000), whilst the revenue so collected since Confederation amounts to about $44,000,000 (£9,040,000). This has been derived from ground rents, timber dues, transfer fees, and bonuses (that is, sums offered over and above the fixed charges for the right to cut timber). In 1911 the value of the timber cut in Ontario was nearly equal to that of the “cut” in all the rest of the Dominion.