55 



was afterward increased to $2,500,000, to operate the Copper Cliff, 

 Stobie and Evans Mines. 



On May ist, 1886, work was started in earnest at the Copper Cliff 

 mine, and later on in the same year both the Stobie and Evans mines 

 were opened up, and with the exception of a few months last summer, 

 when, on account of some difference with the Canadian Pacific Raihvay, 

 the Stobie was shut down, these three mines have been in active opera- 

 tion ever since. The chief business of the Canadian Copper Company 

 is done at Copper CHff, for here they have prepared a well equipped 

 roast yard, two smelting furnaces, laboratory and offices, and other 

 things requisite for carrying on this mining on an extensive scale. The 

 Stobie and Evans mines are provided with excellent rock houses, but all 

 their ore is brought by branch railways to Copper Cliff to be roasted 

 and smelted. In 1889 the Dominion Mineral Company was formed to 

 operate the Blezard mine, and later on they purchased the Worthington 

 mine from the original owners. During the past summer this company 

 have had their smelter in operation, and both their mines are being 

 energetically developed. During the summer of 1889 the Murray mine 

 was prospected under bond by Messrs. Henry H. Vivian & Co., 

 Swansea, England, and in October of the same year they purchased it. 

 About the end of last September, everything bemg ready, the smelter 

 "was blown in" and set to work on some ore which had been previously 

 roasted. All three companies are now prosecuting the work vigorously, 

 and the output of these mines has already reached very large propor- 

 tions. The whole district has been prospected, and I think that a 

 very conservative estimate would now place the number of promising 

 deposits at twenty. 



The Huronian system in which these ore deposits occur may be 

 regarded as the oldest series of sedimentary strata of which we have at 

 present any certain knowledge. Amongst the more important of these 

 rocks may be mentioned quartzites, greywackes, conglomerates, slates, 

 evenly laminated gneisses, felsites, hydromica, chloritic, epidotic, horn- 

 blendic and micaceous schists and narrow bands of cherty limestone. 

 Most of these clastic rocks have been derived from the waste of older 

 felspathic material, and hitherto it has been most generally supposed 

 and stated that the Laurentian gneiss was the source from which the 



