The prospector of to-day is often a very different man from his predecessor of a generation ago. The old gold hunter used to sally forth armed with a pick, shovel and pan, and usually a very little grub. In his stead men are now taking the field who have had the benefits of a thorough education, both practical and theoretical, and provided with all the equipment necessary for their work. Some of these men carry an outfit somewhat as follows: An iron mortar holding half a gallon, together with a pestle a rough scale for pulp, a more delicate one showing troy grains and pennyweights, a 40-mesh sieve, a burro furnace and muffle, one cupel mould, a couple of dozen scorifiers, tongs to handle the cupel and scorifiers, two annealing cups, a spirit lamp, a dozen test tubes, a pouring mould, five or six pounds of borax and about as much carbonate of soda, five pounds of bone ash, ditto of granulated lead, a pint of nitric acid, ditto of hydrochloric acid, ditto sulphuric acid, ditto of ammonia, twice as much alcohol and two pounds or so of granulated zinc. As a blow pipe outfit he will take a blow pipe, spirit lamp, nitrate of cobalt in solution, cyanide of potash, yellow prussiate of potash, red prussiate of potash, a sheet or two of filtering paper and a couple of three-inch glass filters. With this outfit he can determine any mineral he may come across. By patience and observation the man who starts out to take up prospecting as a road to fortune may easily master the rudiments of his business. It will not take him long to become familiar with the commoner rocks, and the more valuable ores. His own rough tests in the field must be confirmed by competent assayers upon his return to civilization, and in this matter he should be very guarded. The most reliable assays are made either at the different government assay offices or by some of the large metallurgical works whose reputation is world wide. Prospecting is hard work, but the life is healthy and full of excitement, only the explorer should have courage, hope, and good temper, for each and every one will be as necessary in his chosen vocation as his pan and pick. When alluvial or placer gold has been found it is reasonable to suppose that the vein from which it was derived may also reward diligent search, for it is undoubtedly true that most placer gold has come from quartz veins. This, however, is believed not to be invariably the case, a recent school of mineralogists contending that pure masses of alluvial gold have been formed from the accretion or growth of the gold deposited from certain gold salts. This is in any case probably exceptional, and the prospector who finds gold in gravel should seek in the adjacent country for the quartz lodes from which it came. Important deposits may be expected at or about the line of unconformability where slates, shales, quartzites, sandstones, limestones, schists and other sedimentary deposits are pierced by intrusive masses of igneous rocks.