M. Golberry describes Bambuk in gloomy and sombre colours. Its gold is distributed amongst low ranges of peeled and sterile hills. Probably this results from fires and disforesting. It occurs in the shape of spangles, grains, and _pepites_ (nuggets), whose size increases with the depth of the digging. In the Matakon mine the dust adhered to fragments of iron, emery, and lapis lazuli, from which it was easily detached and washed. The less valuable Semayla placer produced dust in a hard reddish loam, mixed with still more refractory materials; it was crushed in mortars with rude wooden dollies or with grain-pestles. The pits, six feet in diameter, reached a depth of from ten to twelve yards, where they were stopped by a bed of hard reddish marle; this the Frenchman held to be the hanging wall of a much richer lode. The people used ladders, but they neglected to collar or brace the mouth, and the untimbered pit-sides often fell in; hence fatal accidents, attributed to the 'earth-spirits.' They held gold to be a capricious elf, and when a rich vein suddenly ran barren they cried out, 'There! he is off!' In later days Mungo Park drew attention by his famous first journey (1795-97) to the highlands of the Mandingoes (Mandenga-land), and revived interest in the provinces of Shronda, Konkodu, Dindiko, Bambuk, and Bambarra. Here the natives collect dust by laborious washings of detrital sand. His fatal second expedition (1805) produced an unfinished journal, which, however, gives the amplest and most interesting notices concerning the gold-production of the region he traversed. My space compels me to refer readers to the original. [Footnote: Murray's edition of 1816, vol. i, p. 40, and vol. ii. p. 751.] The traveller Caillie (1827), after crossing the Niger _en route_ to Tinbukhtu, passed south of the Boure province, in the valley of the Great River; and here he reports an abundance of gold. As in the districts visited by Park, it is all alluvial and washed out of the soil. The dust, together with native cloth, wax, honey, cotton and cattle, finds its way to the coast, where it is bartered for beads, amber and coral, calicoes and firearms. The gold-mines of Boure were first visited and described by Winwood Reade. [Footnote: _Coomassie_, &c., p. 126.] The peninsula of Sierra Leone is not yet proved to be auriferous. Here stray Moslems, mostly Mandengas, occasionally bring down the Melakori River ring-gold and dust from the interior. The colonists of Liberia assert that at times they have come upon a pocket which produced fifty dollars; the country-people also occasionally offer gold for sale. From the Bassam coast middle-men travel far inland and buy the metal from the bushmen. Near Grand Bassam free gold in quartz-reefs near the shore has been reported.