MINING 



3820 



MINING 



THE STORY OF MINING r J 



INING, a general term relating to 

 the practice of working in the earth for valua- 

 ble minerals of all kinds. 



It has often been said that the history of 

 mining is the history of civilization, and that 

 by the progress of mining mankind measures 

 its own advance. The earliest period of man's 

 existence is the Stone Age, a term which sug- 

 gests a brutelike creature with intelligence suf- 

 ficient to overcome the wild beasts. Man lived 

 like the beasts, but he knew enough to use 

 rocks and stones as tools and weapons. 



The Stone Age lasted for thousands, perhaps 

 tens of thousands, of years. Then man found 

 the first metals. Probably gold was the first 

 to be discovered, for it is found in its pure 

 state in many parts of the world, it is shiny 

 and attracts the eye, and frequently lies on 

 the surface. After gold came copper, and then 

 tin, and when man learned to mix copper and 

 tin to make bronze, the Bronze Age began. 

 The stone users were no match for -invaders 

 armed with bronze weapons. So well did 

 bronze serve man that for centuries he looked 

 for nothing* harder. When the Spanish ad- 

 venturers invaded Mexico in the sixteenth cen- 

 tury they found the Aztecs still using bronze 

 weapons and implements of peace. With gold 

 and silver they were familiar, but of iron they 

 were totally ignorant. 



Who first forged iron? The answer must 

 always be a mystery. Pure iron is practically 

 unknown on the earth except in the form of 

 meteorites, and the earliest iron tools were 

 probably made from these. Because iron ore 

 bears no resemblance at all to the metal it 

 contains, iron became known to man only at 

 a comparatively recent time. Even had he 

 learned of its existence, the difficulty of sepa- 

 rating it from its rock matrix was very great. 

 To this day, in remote parts of the world in 

 Africa, in the Malay Peninsula the natives 

 use primitive methods to obtain the iron; a 

 simple hearth is operated by a pump or only 

 blown by the winds, and the heated metal ball 

 is beaten to drive out the impurities. 



In the course of centuries the users of iron 

 conquered the users of bronze, and the Iron 

 Age began. In Africa, so far as present knowl- 

 edge goes, the natives have always used iron. 

 In ancient Greece iron was given as a prize in 

 athletic games. The ancient peoples made 

 deities of their smiths, Vulcan, Hephaestus and 

 Thor, and the commonness of the name Smith 

 in every language shows the importance of the 

 occupation in later days. The present age uses 

 iron in the form of steel, and it is not merely 

 idle speculation to wonder if the twentieth 

 century will not some day be known as the 

 Steel Age. 



The minerals for which men dig are not 

 evenly distributed throughout the crust of the 

 earth. Diamonds, for example, are compara- 

 tively rare, a fact which partly explains their 

 great cost. Iron, copper and tin, though com- 



mon, are less abundant than coal, which is 

 found under a great part of civilized America 

 and Europe. How many people who enter a 

 jeweler's shop consider the stories of the min- 

 erals which they see stories full of romance, 

 of toil, of hope, and sometimes of despair of 

 enslaved natives. There is the gold of many 

 countries, and the silver of Mexico, Nevada, 

 Bolivia, Spain; there is tin from Cornwall. and 

 Malacca; copper from Lake Superior's shores, 



