B14 Chronicles of Science. [April, 



Bristow, F.R.S., and publisLied in a very handsome volume by 

 Messrs. Chapman and Hall. This is a book which could scarcely 

 have been produced by an Englishman — the whole idea is essen- 

 tially French — and it requires a Frenchman, with all a Frenchman's 

 quick perceptions, and his love of exaggeration, to give form to the 

 idea. Victor Hugo writes a clever romance — ' The Toilers of 

 the Sea;' and M, Simonin seizes on the idea, and writes a nan-a- 

 tive of ' The Toilers of the Mine.' 



"What he (Hugo) so happily calls the dvayKt], or irrepressible 

 power of the Elements, addresses itself alike to the mariner and the 

 miner, for each is the soldier of the deep, against whom the powers 

 of nature wage at times their utmost fui-y." This paragraph gives 

 the key to the whole book ; and every action of the miner's life 

 is seen through the medium which has been coloured by the 

 influences of Victor Hugo's romance. The author ]irofesses to 

 describe the struggle of the miner " in its reality, without exag- 

 geration of any sort." This profession is not fulfilled, since every 

 page of the original book is coloured beyond the truth ; and with all 

 the efforts made by the translator to subdue this sensational writing 

 to a more sober tone, he has only partially succeeded in doing so. 



' Under-ground Life ' is, especially in its English form, never- 

 theless, a book full of interest; its interest depending upon the 

 most graphic descriptions of the perils which attend all subterranean 

 labours. Every detail of mining is fully and in most cases faithfully 

 given ; the tools, the lamps, the processes — from boring the ground 

 in the search for coal, to the removal of the coal from its bed — are 

 carefully described. The dangers which await the miner are drawn, 

 as we have said, with a bold pencil ; and, as in the drawings, so in 

 the text, the exj)losion of fire-damp and of gunpowder, the inun- 

 dation of a mine, or the collision of tubs in a shaft, becomes equally 

 the subject of sensational drawing and writing. 



After all, we are not certain whether in a book of this sort — a 

 book intended for the pubhc, and decorated to the extent which 

 fits it for the drawing-room — the proper course has not been 

 adopted, especially when the work was originally intended for the 

 author's countrymen; and is now — with the interpolations on 

 British Mining by the translator— produced as a. popular Treatise 

 on Mining. 



M. Simonin naturally looks at mining from a French point of 

 view ; and, although he admits that mining in Great Britain is far 

 more extensive than it is on the continent, he insists upon it, that 

 the same amount of careful system is not observed in the English 

 mines as is to be seen in the mines of France and Germany. Mr. 

 Bristow, who bas translated the book in a most creditable manner, 

 and who has used considerable judgment in adapting it to the 

 English reader, might have modified still further much that Simonin 



