To commence with Mr. Hale's account:--"The valley of the Kinta is, and has been for a very long time, essentially a mining country. There are in the district nearly five hundred registered mines, of which three are worked by European Companies, the rest being either private mines, i.e. mines claimed by Malays, which have been worked by them and their ancestors for an indefinite period, or new mines, in other words new concessions given indifferently on application to Malays and Chinese. There are about three hundred and fifty private Malay mines, and it is with these principally that the following paper will deal. "So far, no lodes have been discovered in Kinta; it is, however, probable that, as the country is opened up and prospectors get up amongst the spurs of the main range, the sources of the stream tin will come to light. "Mining in Kinta, like mining in Lârut, is for stream tin, and this is found literally everywhere in Kinta; it is washed out of the sand in the river-beds--a very favourite employment with Mandheling women; Kinta natives do not affect it much, although there is more than one stream where a good worker can earn a dollar per day; it is mined for in the valley, and sluiced for on the sides of hills; and, lastly, a very suggestive fact to a geologist, it has been found on the tops of isolated limestone bluffs and in the caves [434] which some of them contain. "This stream tin has probably been worked for several centuries in Kinta; local tradition says that a very long time ago Siamese were the principal miners, and there is evidence that very extensive work has been done here by somebody at a time when the method was different from that which is commonly adopted by Kinta Malays at the present day. There are at least fifty deep well-like pits on the Lahat hill, averaging about eight feet in diameter and perhaps twenty feet deep. "Further up country I have seen a large pit which the natives called a Siamese mine; this is about fifty feet in diameter and over twenty feet deep, and its age may be conjectured from the virgin forest in which it is situated. Besides these, at many places extensive workings are continually brought to light as the country is opened up, and these appear to have been left undisturbed for at least a hundred years. Further evidence of old work is furnished by slabs of tin of a shape unlike that which has been used in Perak in the memory of living persons; and only a few weeks ago two very perfect 'curry stones' of an unusual shape and particularly sharp grit were found at a depth of eight feet in natural drift. These may, perhaps, have been used to grind grain. "So peculiarly is Kinta a mining district, that even the Sakais of the hills do a little mining to get some tin sand wherewith to buy the choppers and sarongs which the Malays sell to them at an exorbitant price.