388 Geological Society : Anniversary Address. 



send them ; particularly maps, sections, and under-ground plans, 

 which will record the state of each mine, when it is abandoned, for 

 the information of those who at a future period may be disposed 

 to bring it again into operation. This office will be accessible to 

 all persons interested in obtaining the information it will afford. 

 To this collection several engineers of most extensive experience 

 in the mines of Newcastle and Cornwall have promised large con- 

 tributions. 



The keeper will make copies of documents of this kind, which 

 proprietors of mines, who cannot conveniently part with the ori- 

 ginals, may lend, for the purpose of being preserved in this national 

 collection. 



The public importance of such a records office was submitted to 

 the Lords of Her Majesty's Treasury by a Committee of the British 

 Association for the Advancement of Science, assembled at New- 

 castle in August, 1838 ; it being notorious that great losses of life 

 and destruction of property have resulted both at Newcastle and in 

 other coal mines throughout the kingdom, from the imperfect pre- 

 servation of records of the operations previously conducted in them, 

 and that still greater losses will inevitably ensue hereafter, unless ad- 

 vantage be taken of the experience of living engineers and coal pro- 

 prietors, who are willing to place in a public national repository copies 

 of the documents they possess relating to their respective mines. 



In 1834, the attention of the public was called to this subject by 

 Mr. T. Sopwith*, an eminent civil engineer and mine surveyor at 

 Newcastle ; and this gentleman is preparing a practical book of 

 instructions on the subject of drawing geological and mining plans, 

 the conducting of subterranean surveys, and examining mineral dis- 

 tricts, with a view to the preservation of such information respecting 

 the state of each mine at the period when it may be abandoned, as 

 may be useful when further proceedings are afterwards commenced 

 therein, or in its vicinity. 



A museum of ceconomic geology, comprehending institutions of 

 this kind, demonstrates, even to the unlearned, the advantages that 

 result from science in its application to the extraction of the trea- 

 sures which Providence has laid up in the rich storehouses of the 

 interior of the earth ; and by exhibiting the results obtained from 

 the elaboration of these materials, by the industry of man, in the 

 workshop and at the forge, will afford a full and satisfactory reply 

 to the question so often raised by persons to whom the value of the 

 truths of pure science and philosophy, pursued for their own sake, 

 are unintelligible, and by whom everything is appreciated merely 

 according to its immediate subserviency to the acquisition of 

 wealth, or its ministration to the daily necessities or conveniences 

 of human life. 



BUILDING-STONE COMMISSION. 



Another event which marks increasing attention to the practical 

 importance of geology, is the publication of a Report to the Commis- 



* See Sopwith on Isometric Drawing, p. 50, et seq. 



