But the State may give yet another stimulus to mining, which, I feel sure, would prove of great advantage to the State. The present royalty is five per cent. on the value of the gold produced, and from this source the Government last year received 5 lakhs and 18,000 rupees. Now the prosperous companies which are paying good dividends do not feel this to be a very serious burden, but it is a serious burden—every shilling of expenditure indeed is—to a company which has not begun to pay dividends, and I would suggest that, till a company is able to pay dividends, one-half of the royalty, or, better still, the whole of it, might be remitted. This sum would by no means be lost to the State, for does not the milk that is left in the cow go to the calf?
The measures I have proposed would be of such obvious advantage to the State that, were I a shareholder, or intending investor, in mines in Mysore, I should have no hesitation in suggesting their adoption, but it may be as well to mention that I am neither.
I drove one afternoon with my host to the court on the field, and had some conversation with the magistrate regarding thefts at the mines, and it certainly appears that a special Act is required to check the stealing of gold. Sponge-gold (i.e., gold from which the quicksilver has been evaporated), quartz, or gold amalgam, if found in the possession of any person, renders the individual liable to prosecution, if the possession of gold in any of these forms cannot be satisfactorily accounted for. But the individual cannot be called to account for having ordinary pure gold in possession. Now in a man's possession at the mines there has been found all the means of separating the gold by quicksilver, and it is therefore quite clear that gold stolen in either of the first three mentioned forms may, after having been deprived of its concomitant impurities, be held by an individual to any amount, and even by a workman earning 6d. a day, without his being liable to be called upon to account for its possession. Some Act to meet this kind of case is then clearly required—an Act similar to our Mysore Coffee-stealing Prevention Act, which provides that any person not a planter is liable to be called upon to account for coffee in his possession.
A difficult point occurs where quartz is found in a hut occupied by several people, as it is impossible to charge any one person with being in illegal possession of the article. There are numerous evidences of gold stealing, and certainly some summary process ought to be established with the view of checking these thefts. I may add that the Government is much interested in this matter, as five per cent. of the gold belongs to it, and is handed over in the shape of royalty. Those who are most concerned should bring the matter annually before the members of the Representative Assembly. Even in England remedies for, or mitigations of, evils are not provided without much continuous parliamentary hammering.
After discussing the subject of gold stealing with the magistrate, I called on the manager of the Mysore mine, and afterwards went with my host to a lawn tennis party at the house of the doctor of the mines, who is employed by the various companies. He has a comfortable bungalow, which is at a considerable elevation above the level of the valley, and commands an extensive view of the surrounding country and of the distant hills. Above the house, and at some little distance on one side of it, stands the hospital, and on a knoll just below, the building of the new Roman Catholic church was in progress, and the walls were nearly finished. From the doctor's bungalow a good general view of the whole field can be obtained, and I was particularly struck with the number of buildings to be seen in all directions. I was told that from this point as many as thirty tall chimneys can be counted.
There is a great want of water in the field, for purposes connected with the separation of the gold from the quartz, and tanks are being provided to store it. I venture to suggest that a considerable distance of the catchment area on the sides, and especially at the back, of the tanks should be honeycombed with pits, as the water, which is often largely lost from falling in heavy deluges, would thus percolate into the ground, and so find its way into the bed of the tank by degrees. I may mention that a great effect has been produced in the case of a tank on one of my coffee estates by thus digging pits to catch water that would otherwise run directly down into the tank, to be largely lost by the overflow during heavy rains, and a similar effect has been produced on the property of a neighbour. In fact, the effect produced by such pits on the supply of water in tanks is far greater than one could have imagined to be possible, and I may therefore, in passing, call particular attention to the advisability of such pits being made near tanks used for agricultural purposes. On the margins of the tanks, and in parts of the bed where sufficient soil exists, trees should be planted, with the view of diminishing evaporation from the surface of the water.
When the railway is completed, soil might easily be brought into the field oil trucks, and the pits dug for trees should be filled with it. The planting of trees in and around the field would certainly be beneficial in many obvious ways, and would improve the climate and probably affect, not perhaps the amount, but the distribution of the rainfall. I would suggest that if earth closets were used by the people, and the used earth spread around the trees, there would be a great improvement in their growth. This would at once improve the sanitation of the field and beautify it at the same time.
The reader has now probably learned enough of this rising settlement,[[29]] and I have only to add that on the day following I returned to Bangalore, after having had a most pleasant and interesting time of it with my friends on the Kolar field.
I next pass to a brief mention of the other auriferous tracts in Mysore, which were surveyed in 1887 by Mr. R. Bruce Foote, Superintendent of the Geological Survey of India, who, in connection with his investigations between February 2nd and May 7th of that year, travelled no less than 1,300 miles in Mysore in marching and field work. A full report of his work appears in the "Selections,"[[30]] and this is accompanied by a map in which Mr. Foote has sketched out the distribution of the auriferous rocks. In the "Selections" alluded to there, is also a "Report on the Auriferous Tracts in Mysore," by Mr. M. F. Lavelle, and "Notes on the Occurrence of Gold and other Minerals in Mysore," by Mr. Walter Marsh, Mining Engineer. But in the brief remarks I have to make I shall confine my attention to Mr. Foote's Report.
Mr. Foote informs us that the chief gold-yielding rocks of Southern India belong to one great geological system, to which, from the rocks forming it occurring very largely in the Dharwar country, he two years previously gave the name of the Dharwar System, as he saw the necessity of separating them from the great Gneissic System, with which they had formerly been grouped. In his long tour in Mysore he found that every important auriferous tract visited lies within one or other of the areas of the Dharwar rocks, or forms an outlying patch of the same. These Dharwar rocks, it appears, are the auriferous series in Mysore, the ceded districts, and the Southern Maharatta country.