In “dry blowing” the operator takes the dish about half full of dirt, and standing with his back or side to the wind, if there be any, begins throwing the stuff up and catching it, or sometimes slowly pouring it from one dish to another, the wind in either case carrying away the finer particles. He then proceeds to reduce the quantity by carefully extracting the larger fragments of rock, till eventually he has only a handful or so of moderately fine “dirt” which contains any gold there may be. If in good sized nuggets it is picked out, if in smaller pieces or fine grains the digger slowly blows the sand and dust aside with his breath, leaving the gold exposed. This process is both tedious and unhealthy, and of course can only be carried out with very dry surface dirt. The material in which the gold occurred at Mount Brown was composed of broken slate and alluvium with a few angular fragments of quartz. Yet, strange to say, the gold always had a waterworn appearance, probably due to erosion by drifting sand as is so often the case in Westralian so-called alluvial. Dry blowing is now much in vogue on the West Australian fields owing to the scarcity of water; but the great objection is first, the large amount of dust the unfortunate dry blower has to carry about his person, and secondly, that the peck of dirt which is supposed to last most men a lifetime has to be made a continuous meal of every day. [Illustration: FIG. 4. PUDDLING TUB.] [Illustration: PLATE I.--TUB PUDDLING _To face p._ 18] For wet alluvial prospecting the appliances, besides pick and shovel, are puddling tub (Fig. 4 and Pl. I.), tin dish, and cradle (Fig. 5 and Pl. II.); the latter, a man handy with tools can easily make for himself. [Illustration: FIG. 5. SECTIONAL SKETCH OF CRADLE.] In sinking, the digger should be careful (1) to avoid making his shaft inconveniently small, and (2) not to waste his energy by sinking a huge “new chum” hole, which usually starts by being about three times too large for the requirements at the surface, but narrows in like a funnel at 10 feet or less. A shaft, say 4 feet by 2 feet 6 inches and sunk plumb, the ends being half rounded, is large enough for all requirements to a considerable depth, though I have seen smart men, when they were in a hurry to reach the drift, get down in a shaft even less in size.