The gold rocks of Georgia and Virginia yield, on an average, less than half a cent to the pound, and yet the profits are sufficient to justify deep mining. What then must be the profits of working a rock which lies near the surface, and which yields over a dollar to the pound! The result staggers credulity; and we seek a refuge from the weakness of faith in the more reasonable persuasion, that the specimens tested are richer than the average of the veins and quarries which remain. And yet the poorest specimen, which the casual blow of the sledge has knocked from the sunlit peak, has seemingly more gold in its shadow, than the rock unhouseled from its mine in Virginia beneath forty fathoms of darkness. The only real defence for our incredulity lies in the presumption, that the gold-bearing quartz, like the surface deposits, has its confined localities. And yet Mr. Wright, our member of Congress from California, who has traversed the slopes of the Sierra, collected more specimens, and made more experiments than any other individual, is sanguine in the opinion that the gold-bearing quartz occupies a broad continuous vein through the entire extent of the foot range: and in this opinion the Hon. T. Butler King, in his lucid report, coincides. Still such a wide departure in nature from all her known laws, or capricious impulses, in the distribution of gold, leaps beyond my belief. In no other part of her wide domain has she deposited in the quartz rock a proportion of gold more than sufficient barely to compensate the hardy miner: and it is difficult to believe, that with all her affection for California, she has been so prodigal of her gifts. It surpasses the rainbow-inwoven coat bestowed by the partial love of the patriarch on his favorite child. When a simple swain saw a necromancer break a cocoanut shell and let fly half a dozen canary birds, he remarked, there was no doubt the young birds were hatched in the cocoanut; but what puzzled him was, to know how the old bird could get in to lay the eggs. But a deeper puzzle with me is, that each and every cocoanut on this California tree, should have a nest of canaries in it. And yet, with all these dogged doubts and dismal dissuasives, were I going to invest in California speculations, my inklings would turn strongly to quartz and stampers.