MINING. 20% 
mining captains to observe these veins closely, and trace them 
up when a “fault”? occurs. There are no scientific rules for 
finding the ore; and the business of searching for the large 
deposits is never intrusted to educated mining engineers, but 
always to mining captains, who have themselves been laborers, 
and have learned by experience where to seek, The New 
Almaden mine produces two hundred and twenty thousand 
pounds of metal ina month. The hacienda, or reducing estab- 
lishment of the mining company, has fourteen brick furnaces, 
each fifty feet long, twelve feet high, and twelve feet wide. At 
one end of each furnace is the fire chamber, which may be nine 
cubic feet inside; next that is the ore chamber of about the 
same size; and beyond that is the condensing chamber in 
which there are a number of partitions alternately running up 
from the bottom and down from the top, with a space for the 
fumes to pass, their course being up and down, and up and 
down again, and so on, for a distance of thirty feet to the 
chimney, which is forty feet high. In the bottom of the con- 
densing chamber is water. The walls between the fire cham- 
ber and the ore chamber, and between the latter and the con- 
densing chamber, are built with open spaces, so that the heat, 
smoke, and fumes can pass through. The ore is placed in the 
ore chamber in such a manner as to leave many open spaces. 
The heat drives off the sulphur and mercury of the ore in 
fumes, which in passing through the condensing chambers, de- 
posit the mercury, and the smoke and sulphur escape through 
the chimney. In the Enriqueta and Guadalupe mines the 
quicksilver is condensed in a close iron retort, and the sulphur 
is absorbed by quicklime. 
Copper ore is dug from several mines in California, but it is 
all exported to be smelted elsewhere. 
§ 216. Platinum.—Platinum, iridium, and osmium, three 
white metals of about the same specific gravity with gold, are 
found with the latter metal in the placers in the basin of 
the Klamath and Trinity Rivers. Their particles are usually 
fine scales, very rarely reaching a quarter of an ounce in weight, 
