Copper Mines. 371 
imagination in matters of Love and Marriage, but refrain 
from discussing on such delicate ground. That there is a 
wide scope for fancy in this case is apparent from the 
writings of poets from the earliest ages down to the present 
time. 
COPPER MINES.—No. IT. 
(Continued from page 285.) 
SHAFT is, in appearance, very like an ordinary well 
from which excavations are described as having been 
made to the north and south, at a certain depth, called 
cross-cuts; these being of sufficient width to enable two 
‘men to work abreast, and about five and a half or six feet 
in height. Ifthe eround be not hard, and the expense of 
excavating be consequently not great, such experimental 
excavations or cross-cuts are frequently continued to the 
distance of two or three hundred feet, so as to prove the 
ground, during which the most minute variations in the 
strata are noticed and scrutinized ; and if any promising 
symptoms present themselves, transverse sections are im- 
mediately commenced in pursuit of them, to the E. and 
W., following the course of the strata to which the excava- 
tion described had heen in an opposite direction. A work- 
ing which had proceeded to the extent before mentioned, 
(and which may be called, quite incipient,) would require 
about eighteen workmen, fourteen of whom would be let 
up and down by a windlass, at the opening or mouth of 
the shaft, by buckets, which would be also used in the 
transmitting of the excavated matter or earth. Of these 
men, two would be employed in each, driving from the 
cross-cut ; two, in wheeling the excavated matter from 
them to the bottom of the shaft; one, in filling the buckets 
from the barrow, and two at the windlass; making alto- 
gether, (as there must be a day set and a night set) eighteen 
hands. The instance before us, (if the details of it be 
summed up,) suppose a shaft or well, six feet square, to 
have been sunk perpendicularly about thirty or forty feet ; 
at which depth the writer has supposed passages to have 
been made from it, branching N. and S., with a view of 
dividing the strata, so as to cut or intercept any vein of ore 
