Excitement, hard work, intricate scientific and technical know-how, steadfast perseverance and swash-buckling audacity-all these play their part in the glamorous and rewarding business of the Canadian mineral industry. From the razzle-dazzle of the learned Prospectors and Developers Association's annual dance in Toronto (where gold bricks are the door prizes and where millionaires touch their glasses with those of penniless prospectors looking for a stake to play out their latest hunches), right across to the other end of the scale where the solid citizenry of the small and large mining towns across the country attend Sunday church with their well-cared for children, the mining industry is as Canadian as magnetic north. Employing an overall work force numbering a quarter million (when including such jobs as smelting and refining) Canada's mineral industry produces more than $4,000,000,000-worth of metals, industrial minerals and fuels from her amazingly abundant reserves. Of this tremendous annual crustal crop about 60 per cent goes abroad to earn the nation's biggest (about one third) share of the vital export trade. Since the adventurous gold-rush days of the Cariboo and the Yukon, mining and Canada have been synonymous. Today, this holds true more than ever before, on a vigorous nationwide scale of activity and richness that must have the old time prospectors chortling in their graves.