Page:Cassier's Magazine Volume XV.djvu/410

crucibles yearly, and the great results of ancient mining were all obtained by the multiplication of small units. Now, by the use of steam, our mines yield thousands of tons each day, and one

SOME JAPANESE MINING METHODS

furnace, producing 500 tons of iron in a day, does the work of 250,000,000 Chinese crucibles.

Japanese pictures give us a good illustration of mining in the day when it was carried on entirely by human labour without assistance from other power. In the little sketch above we see a miner wielding a huge hammer to drive a wedge into the rock, and another working with a single hand hammer. Chipping the rock away in this manner was, with the exception of fire-setting the only method of mining for thousands of years until the introduction of gunpowder two or three centuries ago, and elaborate lectures upon it were delivered in mining schools within this half century. The illustration also shows a hand pump and an ore carrier with his basket.

The ancient operations of metallurgy are well shown in the adjoining cut, where men are seen smelting copper ore in a small furnace. The latter, two feet high, is characteristic of barbaric work to this day. The man seated is pushing the piston of the air-blowing machine, made of a square wooden box, in which works a piston made sufficiently tight by feathers.

The same construction was used in Europe, and Agricola shows us, in the cut on page 397, a man making a fan with feathered vanes. The great results which can spring from the multiplication of these small units of production are illustrated by the Bonze, a great statue of Buddha, 40 feet high, shown on the preceding page.

The number of men employed by the ancients in mining must have been very great, and the influence of this industry upon human life and happiness was so important that even to our own day mining has not recovered from the ill repute which brutality and greed once gave it.

The old mines were horrible working places. The galleries were low, tortuous, so poorly supported that accidents by caving of the roof were probably frequent. They were lighted by pine knots or by lamps, made only of a clay saucer filled with ill-smelling vegetable oil or tallow, in which a bit of rush, pith, or rag, floating, served for wick; and they were without ventilation to carry off the dense smoke from these lamps and the effluvia arising from severe labour. Even after centuries of experience, when mining had become a great industry, the condition of the miner was deplorable.

When deep mining began, his labour became still more severe, for all the products, water as well as rock, were

ANCIENT METHOD OF SMELTING COPPER ORE

carried out at first on the men's backs. The introduction of machinery brought no alleviation, for it was worked by man power.

Water was raised from level to level