3-004 (Text)

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I have all along disclaimed any pretensions to scientific knowledge. Without any knowledge whatever, of the science of geology, I simply compared, in my own mind, the geological formations which I saw in California with others that I had seen in Australia eighteen years previously; and, becoming fully persuaded that if the existence of gold was to be tested by such outward appearances, gold must exist in Australia as well as in California, I acted on that persuasion, and, as will be seen in the sequel, at the very first trial discovered the existence of gold where I had imagined it to be, and in an alluvial form. 
It was with an anxious heart, therefore, that I again landed at Sydney, in the month of January, 1851. On my passage