In a report to Col. Charles Warren, acting administrator of Griqualand West, by Mr. T. C. Kitto, a mining engineer who was then visiting the province, and who previously had some experience in Brazil, and which report was published in the local government _Gazette_ of July, 1879, he states: “I shall at once assume the Kimberley mine formation to be the result of earthquakes and volcanic agency. That the De Beers, Du Toit’s Pan, and Bulfontein belong to the same group; that the diamond deposit has been ejected from below, and that the diamonds were formed previous to their final deposition in the crater.” Another geologist, Mr. Thos. Bain, district inspector P. W. D., “considers the numerous superficial deposits of calcareous tufa are the detritus of the tertiary deposits,” as the following quotation from Silver’s “Hand Book of South Africa” suffices to show: “In reference to the beds of clay-stone porphyry before mentioned, Mr. Bain supposes them to be the products of a vast volcano situated somewhere in the Drakensberg range, whose products spread ruin and desolation over the carboniferous forests for hundreds and thousands of square miles, and were afterward swept away by the action of water, except what yet remains of the débris in those porphyry dykes, and the greenstone tops of the multitudinous hillocks and kopjes in the region toward the north. The elevated plateaus of Hantam, Roggeveldt, Nieuweld and Sneeuwberg form its inland boundaries. This immense desert, as geology tells us, was once a great lake, bordered by an umbrageous flora, whose former existence can only now be attested by the petrified monocotyledons buried in its finely laminated slates, and whose waters were crowded with the numerous adentulous animals or the varied family of dicynodons and other saurian reptiles found in no other part of the globe.” I give another extract from this admirable guide book of South Africa, as bearing upon this subject: “In the part of Namaqualand called Bushmanland, and which is a vast table-land about 3,000 feet above the sea, are immense deposits of what Mr. Dunn calls glacial conglomerate. These extend westward into the sovereignty (Free State), and in them in a sort of tufaceous limestone deposit seem to occur the diamond deposits which have made that region so famous.” Dr. Ure, in his “Dictionary of Arts, Mines and Manufactures,” states: “The ground in which diamonds are found in the mines of Brazil is a solid or friable conglomerate, consisting [Illustration: ]