Show ANENT THE ENGINEER it is undoubtedly a charitable act to give the young man just starting starting out on the road to fame and fortune a chance to make good the employer who does so may even be the means of making a man of him if he make a fool of himself but it is not always entirely fair to the stockholders when the management of a mine hires a young and inexperienced engineer or metallurgist to decide important questions at such times it is best to be on the safe side and employ a man who is known to have made a study of the particular branch of the industry with which the problem in hand is connected in fact the really safe course is to deal with the man of experience and reputation the man who is known to have made a success of his A contemporary tells of the experience of the keating gold mining company at its property in the radersburg burg district of mon tana the story has its humorous side but 1 such happenings have a bad effect on mining as a whole and serve to give it an undeserved black eye the occurrence fol specialty lowed the failure to construct a proposed railroad into the district and was due to a laudable desire of the directors to put the property on a paying basis the plan of constructing a mill was taken up but before proceeding the directors thought it best to get an expert to to make an examination of the mine and the ores and to decide on the best process and equip ment so one was secured and sent to the property in due course of time lie he returned and reported that he was only a geologist and that what they needed was a a metallurgist to furnish the required information so a metallurgist was secured his reports was not what the directors needed and a third man was sent this one got on the right track after a fashion for he spent two weeks on the ground and then sent three thousand pounds of ore taken from the three hundred level to san francisco for testing after another wait of a few weeks the report came back that there was no copper in the ore and that what was nee needed ded was a cyanide mill but the directors had known this all the time they also knew that at four hundred feet depth the ore carries about two per cent copper in addition to other values the problem is to find a process suitable for saving these values though the real problem before the management at present seems to be to find a suitable metallurgist one of the directors even remarks with no great amount of enthusiasm that he fears more experts must be consulted in the meantime the stock has dropped from nearly I 1 two dollars to around fifty cents a share and bear stories on the market are as numerous as in yellowstone park and so we say that in matters of similar importance it is cheaper to consult the man with a reputation and to let the other fellow give assistance to the embryonic engineer |