266 LIGHT SCIENCE FOR LEISURE HOURS. 



miners now engaged in our coal mines is far in 

 excess of the number employed in the beginning of the 

 present century. Thus accidents in the present day 

 are at once more common on account of the increased 

 rapidity with which the mines are worked, and when 

 they occur there are more sufferers; so that the fre- 

 quency of colliery explosions in the opening years 

 of the present century, and the number of deaths 

 resulting from them, are in reality much more signifi- 

 cant than they seem to be at first sight. But even 

 independently of this consideration, the record of the 

 colliery accidents which took place at that time is 

 sufficiently startling. Seventy-two persons were killed 

 in a colliery at North Biddick at the commencement 

 of the present century. Two explosions in 1805, at 

 Hepburn and Oxclose, left no less than forty-three 

 widows and 151 children unprovided for. In 1808, 

 ninety persons were killed in a coal-pit at Lumley. 

 On May 24, 1812, ninety-one persons were killed by 

 an explosion at Felling Colliery, near Gateshead. 

 And many more such accidents might readily be 

 enumerated. 



(From the Daily News, December 4, 1868). 



