At least one member of the board of directors should understand mining. Good salaries paid to the mining engineer or manager, and to the secretary, will be money well spent, provided they are competent. Cheap men have no business in such responsible positions, where the handling and wise expenditure of large sums of money necessitate brains and special training. As to the mine manager, he should be a miner, surveyor, metallurgist, assayer, bookkeeper and half-dozen other things rolled into one, and that one an honest man. Very low grade ore would probably pay in the hands of such a paragon of perfection--but he must be sought for long and diligently, and even then he may not be found. New processes are to be shunned until they have proved their worth and ceased to be new. No sooner is a mine floated than all sorts of knaves and fools appear on the scene, with new and wonderful appliances for saving 99.9 per cent. of all the value in the ore. Be rude to them. Drive them away with sticks and stones if necessary, but as you value your salvation do not hearken to them. Let some one else do the experimenting; when you know a process is good, the time will have come to spend money on it. There are at the present moment thousands of tons of costly machinery rusting in lonely Rocky Mountain canyons that were in their day "novelties," warranted to save all the values in the ore, while the unfortunate shareholders, whose misspent money freighted these things to their final resting place, are now, perchance, "touching" the belated Chicago or New York pedestrians for a nickel. The only real guide to the economic value of an ore is the treatment of a large bulk of it in the mill. Plenty of ore should be kept blocked out ahead of the workings. The more ore in sight the better for the future of the mine. Lastly, remember that thieving sometimes takes place on rather a large scale, and be on the watch to detect it. But there is a bright side to mining as well as a dark, and those fortunate men who paid 3, 5 or 8 cents for the stock of a mine that now sells for $7 can see it quite plainly; and there are many such. Mining is not a gamble as some would have the world believe, but a legitimate occupation, demanding great nerve and skill, and sometimes great patience, but not infrequently rewarding the possessors of these admirable attributes by wealth almost inexhaustible. CHAPTER IX. MEDICAL HINTS. Miners as a rule are a healthy, hardy lot of men, but nevertheless they are occasionally taken ill, and there is very seldom a doctor near at hand. Moreover, by the very nature of their work they are particularly liable to accidents.