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other enquiries, the damps or exhalations arising in coal mines 
with which that town is surrounded, appeared to him deserving of 
careful and accurate examination. So extraordinary were these 
effects, that he employed much of his leisure time in investigating 
their properties. | Earnestly solicited by the late Sir James 
Lowther, Bart., proprietor of the mines, to engage in this arduous 
undertaking, he was encouraged in the prosecution of it by 
motives of humanity, justly supposing that a more extensive 
acquaintance with subterraneous exhalations might lead to the 
discovery of some more effectual method for preventing their 
dreadful consequences, and for rendering them less fatal and 
destructive. 
With a view to excite the attention of philosophers to such 
subjects, and to promote a spirit of experimental enquiry, he wrote 
several essays on those exhalations, which, in the year 1741, were 
presented by Sir James Lowther to the Royal Society of London, 
by whom they were received with distinguished approbation ; and 
the doctor was in consequence unanimously elected a member of 
that learned body. To these essays, then transmitted to the 
Royal Society, he added, in the year 1746, another, in the form of 
a letter to Sir James Lowther, containing an account of a labora- 
tory which he had erected in the neighbourhood of Whitehaven. 
By favour of Sir James Lowther, it was supplied with a constant 
stream of inflammable air, or fire damp. In this laboratory many 
curious experiments were made upon that subtile body; and by 
its application, as a substitute for fire, several chemical operations 
performed, requiring a long continued and determined degree of 
heat. According to a method discovered by Mr. Carlisle Sped- 
ding, the fire damp was conveyed up an adjacent pit, from which 
it was conducted through a leaden pipe to Dr. Brownrigg’s labora- 
tory. For its reception he invented several furnaces of such 
construction as to be capable of affording the most intense, or 
the most gentle, heat. In the prosecution of his inquiries he 
experienced occasional interruptions from certain irregularities in 
the quantity and motion of the fire damp, which were the effect of 
