634 MINING ENGINEERING 



prising all the duties and abilities that a mining engineer may be 

 called upon to perform or possess, the end point of which is the 

 extraction of valuable minerals and placing them on the market 

 for the service of man. He brings from the ground into active use 

 values which previously lay dormant and unknown to the unin- 

 itiated. He builds, out of apparent nothingness, things which 

 eventually make for use and beauty in the service of men. He has, 

 therefore, wide ethical and philosophical relations with the develop- 

 ment of the human race. 



Development of the Mining Engineer 



Looking back through the eye of the imagination to prehistoric 

 times, we may form a conception of an order of advance in things 

 mining. The primitive man picked up colored stones, bored holes 

 in them, and wore them as amulets for decorative, religious, or me- 

 dicinal reasons. He found the precious stones and prized them for 

 their decorative effect. He found the gold in nuggets, and later, 

 that he could polish, flatten, and shape it, and made a beginning in 

 the metal manufacturing art. 



Gold and precious stones at a very early date must have risen 

 in value and begun to be property, and also begun a career as a 

 medium of exchange. A complete mining plant, at this time, may 

 have been an area of land with ore specimens scattered on the sur- 

 face of the ground and buried in the surface soil, with a few men 

 digging with pointed sticks and moving the soil with rude wooden 

 shovels. The existence of ownership in the soil and mineral may 

 have developed later. 



Stimulated by mineral discoveries, the miner made efforts to 

 define, identify, and name his mineral species and so gave a begin- 

 ning to the science of mineralogy; and his efforts to establish rules 

 of occurrence of his valuable minerals did the same for geology. 



The primitive Asiatic at an early date found the effect of fire on 

 minerals and picked up lead, copper, or iron in the ashes of his 

 camp-fires. Cornwall tin was found in the same way. 



The primitive metallurgist then experimented with his fires and 

 got silver by burning up his lead, and bronze by alloying copper 

 and tin. 



The possibilities fascinated him, the getting stimulated the de- 

 sire to get, and the ingenuity to fashion the tools to get with. In 

 fact, the metallurgist has done much to stimulate the development 

 of the chemist. There came to be a systematic use of fires for roast- 

 ing ore, reverberatories for desulphurizing ore, crucibles for melt- 

 ing, cupels for purifying silver, hearths and shaft-furnaces for 

 smelting. 



