TRAINING OF MINING ENGINEERS. 679 
THE TRAINING OF MINING ENGINEERS. 
By Henry C. Jenkins, A.R.S.M., Assoc. M. Inst. C.E., 
Victoria. 
THE training of mining engineers is so important a matter 
in the Australian Commonwealth—where mining is directly 
and indirectly one of the main industries, and in some parts 
the main industry ; and where the problem as to howto make 
a legitimate profit for shareholders becomes daily a matter 
more and more one calling for scientific skill—that it hardly 
needs any apology for being brought before the notice of the 
Association. 
.1t may, however, be asked, What is a mining engineer? 
And the term is certainly today both wide and vague—as 
wide and vague’as the allied term ‘‘mining manager.” Both 
of these terms are to some people synonymous as‘to persons 
who recognise the two classes, if indeed there be two classes, 
as persons whose business in life is to earn a profit for all 
concerned by actual mining operations, and who rather 
reserve the term “mining engineer” for those who by 
general training and wide practical experience have fitted 
themselves to be consulted with profit by clients, reserving, 
too, the term “mining manager” for those whose actual 
occupation at the moment is the direction of some definite 
undertaking. Such a manager may be, and should be, a 
man of high attainment in science, in practice, and in com- 
mercial skill, and one who would be in a lucrative consulting 
practice only that certain persons see it to their advantage 
to retain his full services for their own undertaking. The 
manager may, however, have an undertaking of moderate 
size, or else a small one; and in the latter case, the drudgery 
that must be done, and the pinch of poverty that small 
concerns often feel, tends far too much to make the average 
manager in some parts of Australia merely the superior 
workman—a man who energetically follows his own limited 
stock of knowledge, and “ follows the pick-point.’’ Not but 
that there should be the easiest possible road made for the 
intellectual industrious man to acquire the necessary 
engineering and other knowledge that would fit him to 
take -part in management—the men who rise by merit get 
this knowledge somehow or other, even though they do not 
know it by its proper name. The unfortunate fact is, that 
there is still a large class of manager that we cannot 
discuss further except to say that it will be all the better 
for the-country when the technical college makes the race 
