206 Memoir of M. D^ Aubuinsoii de Voisins. 



works. After using unskilfully tor many ages the bounty 

 of Nature, and excavating unceasingly the sides of the ferri- 

 ferous mountain, they had opened vast caverns in it by por- 

 tions falling in, and heaped up enormous masses of ruins, the 

 movements of which, even in the present day, can neither be ar- 

 rested nor completely regulated. In the eyes of a man of ex- 

 perience, there was reason to conjecture that at some period, 

 more or less near, not only the traces of the metal might be 

 altogether lost, but that a part of the mountain would sink 

 upon itself, and destroy in a single day, or entomb alive, the 

 whole population of workmen. Neither as an engineer nor 

 as a man could M. D'Aubuisson see this with indifference. 

 In the year 1811 he brought this subject under the notice of 

 the administration, and proposed that it should assume the 

 direction of this mine, which was then merely under the 

 management of the commune, or which at least, having been 

 formerly ceded by the domain to an ancient vallee of the 

 Pyrenees, and regulated by the consuls of Vicdessos, was 

 without a chief since the centralization of '89 had banished 

 from France all these kinds of petty republics, of which An- 

 doiTe has continued up to the present day to be perhaps the 

 only example. M. D'Aubuisson's wishes were soon realised ; 

 and it was chiefly in accordance with the propositions made 

 by him in his different reports that the administrative ar- 

 rangements of the mines of Vicdessos were made, and they 

 are now placed under the management of engineers. This 

 arrangement, although troublesome to them, has been of great 

 advantage to the poor miners, and has been, for thirty years, 

 of great service to this part of the French Pyrenees, and will 

 probably be of greater advantage to it still, if it be possible, as 

 for our own part we believe it is, to extend, by suitable mea- 

 sures, the field of new works to the hithei'to untouched bases 

 of the mountain, and carry on all the mining operations there. 

 It cannot, indeed, be affirmed that this administrative or- 

 ganization is absolutely the simplest and best for the profit- 

 able mining of a mineral mass ; but, in order to form a fair 

 estimate of it, we must take into account the circumstances 

 of the period when it was established. The inhabitants of the 

 valley of '^'icdessos, in virtue of old charters, acted as if they 



