McGill stakes claim to seniority

In announcing a most generous gift by Inco to the Mining Engineering Department of Queen’s University for the provision of modern laboratory facilities, you refer to the Queen’s department as Canada’s “oldest mining school” (T.N.M., Feb. 26/1990). Queen’s is rightly known for the excellence of its graduates, particularly its mining graduates, but it is not Canada’s senior mining school. The teaching of mining at Queen’s began in 1893, the year after the University of Toronto started its celebrated mining school.

The mining program at McGill University began even earlier, in 1871 when B.J. Harrington (son- in-law of Principal Sir William Dawson) was appointed lecturer in mining at “$400 a year plus the fees of his class,” which at that time amounted to $7 per student annually. McGill has been graduating mining engineers ever since.

In those early days, 30 or 40 years before our mining industry really got started, mining students at McGill were given courses in “levelling” and “use of blowpipe” as well as mining and geology. French and German texts were preferred and there was also a “collection of mining models, gift of a lady of Montreal and probably the best in the Dominion.”

No doubt they were useful instruction tools in those pre- computer days. Old syllabuses refer to such mysteries as Man Engines, Kibbles and Horse Whims. How many of today’s mining engineers would know how to use a Hartz Ventilator or operate a Rotating Buddle?

But then a hundred years from now, Queen’s and McGill miners alike may be puzzled by 20th- century references to raise boring or wonder how giraffes managed to survive underground at Mines Gaspe. W.M. Williams Professor of Metallurgy McGill University Montreal, Que.