outline, and refresh the eye after it has grown wearied of the grotesque forms of the granite hills. The soil on the stratified rocks is more fertile than it is on the granite, and the vegetation is more charming; the very coarse grasses of the granite soils being replaced by many flowering plants. The ruins which have just been described are all built on granite, but are generally within a short distance of the quartz formation; and the ruins at Zimbabwe are situated four miles from the southern edge of the quartz belt. At Zimbabwe we found little clay crucibles in which gold had been melted, and an accumulation of quartzite rock which had been obtained from the casing of a quartz reef. I carefully tested this rock for gold, but could only find a very minute trace; so I conclude that it had been rejected as too poor for treatment. While at Zimbabwe, whenever I could spare time from the excavations, I made excursions to the quartz belt, and searched for old workings and gold reefs. I found one reef carrying a small quantity of gold, but no old workings. Since then, however, rich gold reefs have been discovered about twenty miles to the north-west of Zimbabwe, and from these probably the ancients obtained their quartz. The quartz formation near the little ruin at the Mazoe River has been much worked for gold, and the Manica belt seems to have been even more exploited. Where the high plateau breaks down at Massi-Kessi an enormous amount of alluvial has been worked. The old people must have obtained, from both the alluvial and the reefs, a great quantity of gold to repay them for the work that they did, and there is no reason to suppose that they have exhausted the reefs; indeed, I have seen at the bottom of old workings the reef continuing and carrying visible gold. Besides gold reefs, these quartz belts contain much iron ore and some manganese. In two isolated patches of the quartzite formation at the Doroba Mountains, near the Sabi River, I found great masses of rich magnetite and hematite, and on the top of Mount ’Nyaguzwe, near Fort Victoria, there is also a mass of magnetite; in fact, so very abundant is iron ore, that compass bearings can rarely be taken with safety from hills in the quartz formation. Along the right bank of the Sabi River, near Mount Wedsa, are many native villages, whose one industry is iron smelting. They obtain the ore from Mount Wedsa, which is renowned far and wide in Kaffirland as an iron-producing mountain. The mineral they select is not very rich, and is consequently more easily smelted, and it contains some manganese. The iron they produce is very pure, and is consequently soft and easily fashioned into weapons and tools. Their anvils are simple blocks of hard diorite, on which they hammer with another smaller block.