“So far as Canada is concerned, the plateau is still, in the main, an unvisited treasury. Over the greater part of the area there have been nothing but the most general scientific surveys. Our southern fringe of the plateau is the only Canadian part that is known, and even of that southern fringe merely a portion has been prospected. Of the more important discoveries in that southern fringe, you will not need to be reminded. There are the gold ranges of the Lake of the Woods; the silver of Thunder Bay; the iron ranges extending from Minnesota for hundreds of miles to Quebec; the copper rocks of Michipicoten and the Bruce mines; the Sudbury copper-nickel deposit; the Montreal River and Cobalt silver areas; the corundum deposits of Eastern Ontario, and the magnetites of Eastern Ontario and Quebec. It is true that few good merchantable iron deposits have been found in our extensive iron range formation; but in the Mesabi range—the richest in the world—only about two per cent. is iron ore, so that immediate discovery in the little prospected areas in Canada is scarcely to be expected.” “And am I not right in supposing, Mr. Brock, that the most sensational mineral discoveries have been purely accidental?” “That is so,” admitted the geologist. “The navvy, in making his excavations, has blundered upon immense treasure. Thus the greatest asbestos deposits of the world were brought to light because a track for the Quebec Central Railway happened to be blasted through them. Then take the case of Cobalt, now the premier silver camp. Although only a few miles from one of the earliest routes of travel in the country, and although only a few miles from a silver-lead deposit that has been known for a hundred and fifty years, Cobalt was discovered less than eight years ago, and then only because a railway chanced to be cut through a rich vein. It was a railway excavation, too, that revealed the Sudbury nickel deposits. Still, you must not run away with the idea that all the laurels have been won by the navvy. To mention only one of the ‘finds’ made by our staff, it was an officer of the survey who discovered the rich corundum deposit extending in a belt one hundred miles long. Yet that discovery serves, equally with those of the navvy, to illustrate the unprospected nature of Canada—even of those parts of Canada that have been populated for a considerable period. For that corundum was found in a district that had long been settled.