180 THE FIRE-DAMP'S FAMILY CIRCLE. 



should exercise a greater sway over the imaginations of men 

 employed in the depths of a mine f 



There, fathoms deep below the surface, with sooty black 

 coal or glittering minerals around them, on which the taper 

 sheds a glimmering light, what marvel that the highly- 

 wrought imaginations of men should have conjured up the 

 lineaments of those gnomes and erdgeister, which have 

 formed such copious stock-in-trade for Volksmarchen and 

 Nursery Tales ? What a field for the begetting of phantoms 

 and chimeras ! Nor was the superstitious element likely to 

 suffer abatement by the real terrors to which miners have 

 been subject at all times. A miner struck down dead by 

 some invisible foe, now known to be carbonic acid gas, or 

 blown to pieces by the inflammable fire-damp, would supply, 

 by these very facts, the elements for perpetuating the belief 

 in subterraneous ghosts and hobgoblins, of which the early 

 literature of Germany and all mining countries is so rife. 



Between the period when all this class of accidents was 

 complacently referred to the agency of supernatural causes, 

 to ghosts and spirits, and those later times when the pheno- 

 mena attendant upon them were traced to the agency of gas, 

 there occurred a middle period, in which miners, abandoning 

 the language of mysticism, had not yet adopted the nomen- 

 clature of chemistry. 



This middle period corresponds with the adoption of the 

 word damp or damp/; a term which has taken firm root in 

 the popular vocabulary, and is not likely to be soon displaced. 

 Now dampf is the German word for vapour ; and inasmuch 

 as the distinction between gases and vapours is known to be 

 altogether arbitrary and conventional, it is even more correct 

 than chemical purists of some thirty years ago might have 

 supposed. 



As may readily be imagined, the subject of mine-damps 

 puzzled men not a little, before the means of catching and 

 investigating the properties of gases was devised. The early 



