But perhaps his most valuable contribution to Cornish literature was a treatise published in 1840, having for its humane object the amelioration of the physical condition of the miner--viz., 'Observations on the Machinery used for Raising Miners in the Hartz.' There can be little doubt that this work tended in no small degree to direct public attention to the great and avoidable exhaustion caused to the miner by his having to ascend many fathoms of ladders after long and laborious work in the heated and vitiated atmosphere of many of our deep mines. The result was the invention of an ingenious machine known as the steam man-engine, by means of which two huge vertical poles, with foot-rests at intervals, are set in motion side by side the whole depth of the mine-shaft. As one pole ascends, the other descends, and thus, by changing from one to the other by help of the foot-rests, the miner is enabled to ascend from his work, or descend to it, with the minimum expenditure of his own strength. If he who makes an oak grow where none grew before is to be considered a benefactor to his race, surely anyone who contributes in greater or less degree to so benevolent and beneficial an object as this steam man-engine has proved to be, has a good claim to be ranked among the philanthropic benefactors of his race. There is, of course, some little risk in performing this feat in the dark, damp and slippery mine-shafts, lit, perhaps, by a solitary candle stuck into a lump of clay and attached to the front of the miner's hat; and it is scarcely necessary to add that the use of the man-engine is most strictly forbidden to all except those by whom it is really required. Is it necessary to say that the man-engine, therefore, became a great attraction to all schoolboys who chanced to be within easy distance of one?--at any rate the writer, then a schoolboy, used to spend parts of many a half-holiday in practically investigating the merits of the machine, by descending by its means into the depths of the earth, until the utter darkness made the descent too dangerous even for a schoolboy. John Basset's eldest son, John Francis Basset, of Stratton, brother of the present owner of the estates (Gustavus Lambert Basset, who served in the Crimea as lieutenant in the 72nd Highlanders), was a barrister, and was Sheriff of Cornwall in 1861. He succeeded to the Tehidy property on the death of his aunt, Frances, Baroness Basset, in 1855, and died at the family mansion in 1869. His chief mining interests (which were immense) were in the Bassets, South Frances, and Dolcoath mines. His landed property lay chiefly in Illogan, Camborne, Redruth, and St. Agnes, besides other estates which he owned in Meneage, Gluvias, Falmouth, Tywardreath, etc.