ment. The conditions are well suited for surface work by stripping or trenching throughout much of the stretch from Herkimer to western Wayne county. In places the ore is encountered directly beneath the soil or at most a few feet of glacial materials, while with its flat dip there is often opportunity to extend the field of operations to considerable distances from the outcrop before the overburden becomes excessive. There is still an abundance of ore that can be removed to advantage by open-cut work.

It is quite recently that mechanical methods of excavation have been introduced, and the greater portion of the product in the past has been won by the crude system of hand labor first employed. With the use of portable steam shovels, the cost of taking out the ore has been so reduced that it is now practicable to strip fully twice as much rock as formerly, notwithstanding the material reduction that has taken place in iron ore prices.

An example of good practice in open-cut excavation is afforded by the recent operations of the Furnaceville Iron Co. at Ontario Center. This company has been engaged in working a strip of land lying to the north of that place and extending for over 4 miles in an east and west line. The plan adopted here consists briefly in opening longitudinal trenches, the first along the northern limits of the property, near the outcrop, and the following ones in parallel order progressively with the removal of the ore from the preceding trench. At the present time about 20 feet of overburden is taken off, while in the first cut some 40 rods to the north the ore lay beneath 6 feet of soil and rock. The trench has a width of 60 feet and until recently two shovels were used in its excavation, each cutting 30 feet or one half the whole width. The shovels loaded into buckets which were hoisted by revolving derricks and dumped on the spoil bank opposite the long face of the trench and just beyond the edge of the ore that was being uncovered. The outer shovel worked somewhat in advance. During the last year the trenching has been done by a single 100-ton shovel which removes the rock for a width of about 45 feet, dumping directly on the spoil bank, and then returns to clear the remainder with the aid of a derrick.1 The shovels and derricks are mounted to run on tracks

1 Since the above account was written, the methods have been somewhat modified in that a conveyor has been installed, as shown in the accompanying plates. The conveyor consists of a portable structure, with two skips each of 6 cubic yards capacity which receive the rock material from the steam shovel and carry it up the incline (129 feet long) to the dump. This apparatus increases the efficiency of the steam shovel, at the same time enabling the latter to excavate the trench to the full width of 60 feet without return.