what are these answers to these questions.

I am reading "The goldfields of Victoria, 1862" and came across a section that raises a number of questions for me so can someone please provide the answers.....thanks in advance.

Men came upon a "promising leader".
what constitutes a promising leader?

Men followed it up.
How does one do that?

Men found a pocket.
How?

Good specimen.
what constitutes a "good" specimen?

Promising leader? Donald Trump promises all the time.

How does one do that? Ladder

Pockets are at the top of trousers, usually found with your hands, fingers or thumbs..

A good specimen?



Hope this helps

Cracker. :lol: :lol: :lol:

A specimen is an Italian astronaut. Lol. (Say it with an Italian accent)

Fire away in here Tassie :Y:
https://www.prospectingaustralia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=381585#p381585

Tassie Daz said:

I am reading "The goldfields of Victoria, 1862" and came across a section that raises a number of questions for me so can someone please provide the answers.....thanks in advance.

Click to expand...

More seriously:

Men came upon a "promising leader".
what constitutes a promising leader?

Click to expand...

A continuous thin vein of mineralised quartz (usually with ironstone) and possibly some visible fine gold. At surface, such a vein was often located in the vicinity of alluvial gold (perhaps traced by loaming surface soil samples) and hence appeared to be a possible source of the eroded, alluvial gold.

Men followed it up.
How does one do that?

Click to expand...

By excavating the bedrock using hand tools and muscle: pick, shovel, hammer and rock chisel, pry bar, sledge-hammered drill rod, supplemented with explosive charges (probably gunpowder in the early 1860's), to fracture the rock.

Men found a pocket.
How?

Click to expand...

By following the promising leader into the solid rock until it widened into an area of mineralised quartz containing visible nuggety gold.

Good specimen.
what constitutes a "good" specimen?

Click to expand...

Mineralised quartz containing visible gold, the more the better.

Tassie Daz said:

I am reading "The goldfields of Victoria, 1862" and came across a section that raises a number of questions for me so can someone please provide the answers.....thanks in advance.

Men came upon a "promising leader".
what constitutes a promising leader?

Men followed it up.
How does one do that?

Men found a pocket.
How?

Good specimen.
what constitutes a "good" specimen?

Click to expand...

Hi Daz
A promising leader would be one that is showing good gold.
Reef miners I believe often referred to leaders or stringers as "shoots" that come off the main reef. When they say "followed it up" they would be talking about trying to track what they believed to be an offshoot to the main gold bearing lode.
Good example explanation from H.W Tilman
"Near the surface the ore body may only be a few inches thick - what is termed a 'leader' or 'stringer' - but if this is found to be carrying gold it is always worth following, as it may lead to the mother lode, of which it is an offshoot".
To follow it there could be different techniques like trenches/costeans, loaming & sampling to follow or pinpoint the richest area/s then the source. In modern times detectors have been used with some success to.
When sampling through any one of a variety of methods a rich patch or pocket of gold can be found. You can find a rich pocket of gold detecting, sampling, loaming, trenching or even just having a dig on a nice bend in a creek.
A good specimen these days would be any quartz/host rock with a show of gold. Historically a specimen would have been a large piece of reef gold.

Thanks fellas for the constructive input. The thread might help others that as yet hadnt actually thought about the terminology.

My onllyslight disagreement would be the term "shoot", which does not usually mean offshoot but ore shoot. We still use the term in mining geology to denote a continuous zone of minera;isation in a vein . So you get into mineralisation then follow it and find that it only continues in a zone say 50 m long within the plane of the vein.However that 50 m long segment might be constantly further north in the vein as you mine to lower depth. You would sAY that you have a north-plunging shoot in your vein in that case. Think of it like a mineralised pencil stuck in the pages of a book (except that it can morwe often be rectangular rather than rod-like. "Leader" is outdated but was used usually in the sense of something thin that might lead to something thicker.