The Law of Mines and Mining in the United States

ΤΟ

THE HON. STEPHEN JOHNSON FIELD,

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States,

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

IN RECOGNITION OF HIS GREAT WORK IN The DevelopmENT AND INTERPRETATION OF THE MINERAL LAND LAW

PREFACE.

THE law of mines has no logical existence as a separate branch of jurisprudence, but it is a convenient phrase to comprehend those special rules of law which have been deduced by the application of general rules to the questions that arise as to the rights and duties of miners and mine owners in their relation to the land, to one another, and to those in contact with whom they are brought by reason of the business of extracting the various kinds of valuable minerals from the earth.

The aim of this book is to give a complete and accurate statement of these special rules of law, so stated and arranged as to furnish what the authors' experience has taught them to be the requirements of the active practitioner. The authors have refrained from giving their own ideas as to the rules that ought to be adopted, and from criticising the rules that the courts have laid down, except when those tribunals have been so opposed to one another as to make it necessary to express a choice between opposite positions. But they have constantly aimed to state clearly the law as it is to-day, and to furnish the reader with every authority and important dictum in support of the statements contained in the text.

The authors have attempted to make this work as comprehensive as possible, and have not confined themselves

to the law which is applicable only to any particular portion of the country, or to mines of any particular kind. The other American books with which they are familiar are confined to the statutory system under which title to mines is acquired and mining is conducted upon those lands which are or have been a part of the public domain. The present work aims to cover this field fully, and also to deal, with equal completeness, with the questions of title to mineral lands, mines and minerals in those States in which the common law on the subject of real estate ownership applies.

As the authors are impressed with the fact that a lawyer who undertakes to deal with the legal questions which are submitted to him by mine owners cannot be completely equipped for the task without a certain knowledge of the formation and mode of occurrence in nature of the various kinds of mineral deposits, the work is preceded by a chapter in which these subjects are explained briefly, but, it is hoped, accurately and fully, and under an arrangement which is based on the classification of the subject required by the law. The importance of this feature will be especially appreciated by those whose practice requires them to deal with mining properties situated upon the public domain, because in the application of the United States statutes important legal distinctions are intimately connected with geological or physical differences.

PHILADELPHIA, September, 1897.

D. M. BARRINGER.

JNO. STOKES ADAMS.