Bisbee daily review., 1916-05-07
IMPROVED MINING IS AID ID CONSERVATISM
 SAYS METALLURGIST
Dr. L. D. Ricketts, Of Bisbee And New York, Says "True Conservatism Means Better Processes And No Waste"
North Atlantic fleet. led by batileship aIic

| True conservatism means really i'm prcvement of processes and avoidance of waste The present generation is | entitled to take and will take from the | earth that which it justly needs, pro- vided it does not wreck and destroy and unduly waste a part of the earth s resources and provided that any par | tially beneticiated substances are stored and held for future treatment. | says Dr. l.. D. Ricketts, in a paper ! presented at the Second Pan-Ameri- can Scientific Congress at Washington i D. C.
 This deduction comes from the fact that as we have accumulated and con tinue to advance in knowledge future generations can utilize material that is at the present time uncommercial or dispense with the use of the prod uct in whole or in part When the question Of the conservation of our 1 mineral resources came up during Roosevelt's' administration. there were estimates showing the limited amount of iron, copper and other ores available for use in the arts, but as l recollect it, these estimates cimply referred to material that was then a. vailable and commercial and did not refer to the immense masses of leaner material that were not then conner cial.
 Attention should be brought further more to the important advance in the metallurgical processes. and especial ly in the mining and metallurgy of copper ores which have resulted from the organized efforts of large and eff cient technical staffs working in har- mony and in unison. The wonderful results obtained have been the work of no one man. and the advance has been the result of wise and intelligent cooperation.
 Wonderful progress has been made by this means in decreasing unit costs and in improvements in process and recoveries. In mining we originated in America and followed. for a gener- ation or more, the square-setting and filling system. which is still important in rich ore masses. Later this was followed by the so-called caving sys- tems, which abandoned an attempt to hold up ground that cannot be held up with usually mattress of timber be tween the overburden and the ore. Such caving systems involve either  slicing or subslicing to provide for re- Inducements and maintenance of an efficient mattress. The caving sys- tems have been borrowed from the iron industry by the so-called shrink age methods that have still further de creased the cost of mining, although they require the holding of great mass es of broken ore underground for long periods of time. Another method is being put into practice. requiring far less storage of broken ore under ground and also avoiding the mattress "a system somewhat similar to the shrinkage system. excepting that far less ore stands broken and single horizontal pillar is maintained under the cavinG ore instead of horizontal pillar and numerous vertical pillars, and excepting that far smaller quan- tity of ore is broken by mining meth ods and a far greater quantity by the natural crushing of the mass. l refer
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