That part of the earth's surface has more miners' shafts to the acre than any other part of the globe. As wages are very low in Poland, averaging not more than forty cents a day for men and ten cents for children, a very small quantity of ozokerite pays for the working. If thirty or forty pounds a day is obtained, it remunerates the two men and one or two children required to work each lease. When the bucket, containing the earth, rock, and wax, is dumped in the little shed covering the shaft, it is picked over by the children, who detach the wax from the clay or rock with knives. The miners use galvanized wire ropes and wooden buckets. When preparing to descend, they invariably cross themselves and utter a short prayer. The business is not free from danger, carelessness on the part of the boy supplying the fresh air, or the caving in of the unsupported roof, causing a large number of deaths. One of the government inspectors of the mines informed me that in one week there had been eight deaths from accidents. The ozokerite is taken to a crude furnace, and put into a common cast iron kettle, and melted. This allows the dirt to sink to the bottom, and the ozokerite, freed from all other solids, is skimmed off with a ladle, poured into conical moulds, and allowed to cool, in which form it is sold to the refiners, for about six cents per pound. The quantity produced is uncertain, as the miners take care to understate it, for the reason that the government lays a tax upon all incomes, and the landowner demands his one-fourth of the quantity mined. The best authority is Leo Strippelman, who states the quantity produced in fifteen years at from 375,000,000 to 400,000,000 pounds, worth twenty-four millions of dollars. As the owners of the land get one-fourth of the sum, they received six millions. This is at the rate of four hundred thousand a year, a rather valuable crop from some two hundred acres of land. The miners do not support the earth by timber or pillars, as they should; the result is that the whole plot of about two hundred acres is gradually sinking, and this will eventually ruin the industry in that part of the deposit. In another part of the same field, a French company has purchased forty acres, and it is mining the whole tract and hoisting through one shaft by steam power. In that shaft they have sunk to a depth of six hundred feet, and are troubled with water and petroleum. These they pump out very much the same way as in coal and other mines, worked in a scientific manner. The thickest layer of ozokerite found is about eighteen inches, and this layer or pocket was a great curiosity. When first removed at the bottom of the shaft, it was found to be so soft that it was shoveled out like putty. During the night it oozed into the space that had been emptied the day before; this continued for weeks, or until the pressure of the gas had become too weak to force it out.