MacFarland

The plaintiff appeals on the judgment-roll alone after trial of a suit to quiet title to certain minerals or mineral rights, and the right to enter upon the defendants’ lands, there to dig, bore, and mine for the subterranean substances. He maintains the findings do not support the judgment, because he claims all the elements of adverse possession on the part of the defendants do not.appear, and because a certain instrument set forth in the findings was, as he urges, merely a release of mortgage and not a conveyance of the minerals and mining rights.

In 1869 the plaintiff’s testator, by an attorney in fact, conveyed certain lands in Humboldt County to the predecessors in interest of the respondents by deed in terms a grant, reserving and excepting therefrom the subterranean oils and minerals and the right to enter upon the grantees’ lands to dig, bore, or mine for the subterranean minerals, paying to the grantees such damages as they might sustain by reason of such entry. Upon the day the grant was made, the grantees mortgaged to the grantor the land conveyed to secure the payment of a promissory note payable August 34, 1870, for $1,880, with interest at ten per cent. During the…