148 



♦ KNOW^LEDGE ♦ 



[Mat 2, 1887. 



pursuit of pleasure is permitted to come in and ruin the 

 health and cripple the natural powers of the young. 



The appetites of youth, which either in social or in soli- 

 tary life drain down the vitality and impair the constitution, 

 are so many insidious assaults on old age. I would that 

 the young knew how clearly these things are written. 

 God's handwriting is very plain and very legible to those 

 who have eyes to see. There is not an intelligent physician 

 that does not read, as he walks through the street, the 

 secret history of the lives of those whom he meets, and 

 that, too, without following them in their midnight career. 

 I care not to have men come to me and state their secret 

 courses; I can read it in the skin and in the eye. There 

 is not one single appetite of passion that has not its natural 

 language, and every undue indulgence of that appetite or 

 passion leaves that natural language more or less stamped 

 upon the skin, upon the features, upon the expression of 

 the face, or the carriage of the body. There is always 

 some token that tells what men are doing, if they are 

 doing anything to excess. Pride has its natural language ; 

 mirthfuluess has ; goodness has. Nobody doubts thi.s. So 

 have the passions their natural language. Men think that 

 if they commit their wickedness in secret places, or in the 

 night, that it is not known. It is known, although no man 

 may ever say to them : " Thou art guilty ! " 



The use of stimulants in youth is another detraction 

 from happiness in old age. ^Nfen usually take what they 

 least need. In other words, we follow our strongest facul- 

 ties, and not our weaker ones ; and therefore if men are 

 excessively nervous they almost invariably seek to make 

 themselves more so. 



I rejoice to say that I was brought up from my youth 

 to abstain from tobacco. It is unhealthy ; it is filth}' from 

 beginning to end. In rare cases, where there is already 

 some unhealthy or morbid tendency in the system, it is 

 possible that it may be used with some benefit ; but ordi- 

 narily it is unhealthy. I believe that the day will come 

 when a young man will be proud of not being addicted to 

 the use of stimulants of any kind. I believe the day 

 will come when not to drink, not to use tobacco, not to 

 waste one's strength in the secret indulgence of passion, 

 but to be true to one's nature, true to God's law, to be 

 sound, robust, cheerful, and to be conscious that these 

 elements of strength and health are derived from the 

 reverent obedience of the commandments of God, will be a 

 matter of ambition and endeavour among men. 



COAL. 



By W. Mattieu Williams. 



T'JNG-'WALL " working is more economical 

 than the methods already described, as it 

 leaves behind no supporting pillars of 

 coal. To understand it, let us suppose 

 that roads are driven in the coal from the 

 pit to the boundary of the " royalty " or 

 area to be worked, and that these lead to 

 another road which crosses them and 

 follows the bDundary. In this case the coal has to be 

 removed from the boundary towards the pit. Further, sup- 

 pose that the roads from the pit ai-e one hundred yards apart, 

 and it is obvious that between each of these roads there is a 

 face or wall of coal one hundred yards long. The problem 

 Ls to cut away this wall on the side towards the pit, and 

 carry all the coal into the pit roads without crushing the 

 men as the unsupported roof comes down. 



The illustration shows how this is done. It represents 

 the foce of the coal as seen in section from the end of one of 

 these pit roads looking forward into the road that is parallel 

 to the boundary. The man is kneeling in face of the wall of 

 the coal to be removed, and working towards the pit. He 

 has already undercut the seam, and is breaking it down, 

 " holeing " it, by striking the wedge. Behind him are seen 

 three props for supporting the roof at the part from which 

 the coal has been removed, and behind these pillars is the 

 goaf ov gob, i.e., the ruins of the crushed-in strata which 

 always give way to the superincumbent pressure when any 

 considerable area is left unsupported. When the cutter has 

 brought down a few feet more of the face upon which he is 

 now working, and the coal has been carried away, the hind- 

 most row of props is knocked away, and brought foiward to 

 form a front row, the roof which they formerly supported 

 now falling down. 



It is commonly imagined that greiit cavities are left in the 

 sites of worked-out coal-mines, and geological and even 

 cosmical theories have been based on the assumption that 



the shrinkage of the cooling earth will leave vast cavities 

 beneath its crust, in which the ocean will finally be engulfed 

 and leave the surface of the earth as arid as that of the 

 moon. An examination of the goafs and creeps of coal 

 workings would, I think, completely convert the most 

 earnest advocates of these views. I have groped through 

 many celebrated natural caverns, and find them to be nothing 

 more than narrow tunnels with occasional enlargements, the 

 widest of wh:_h cannot display an unsupported roof nearly 

 equal in length and span to the Midland Railway Station at 

 King's Cross. 



Although such caverns are continuou.sly in the course of 

 formation and enlargement wherever surface water percolates 

 limestone rocks, they usually crush in even before attaining 

 the dimensions of the Albert Hall. The crushing in of 

 the roof of the ten-yard seam in South Staffordshire is a 

 continual source of minor artificial earthquakes. 



Houses are split down the middle, and others toppled 

 over ; railways drop, and have to be continually relevelled. 

 In the report of the Committee on Accidents in Coal Mines, 

 1849, we are told that " it is a matter of everyday occur- 

 rence for houses to fall down, or a row of buildings inhabited 

 by numerous families to assume a very irregular outline, 

 from what they call a sivag caused by the sinking of the 

 ground into old workings. It is often a serious matter to 

 find a sound site for church or school building. . . . There 

 is an instance in the parish of Sedgley of a church and 

 parsonage house, recently erected, composed of wooden 

 framework, which will admit of their being screwed up into 

 the perpendicular again whenever they may be thrown out 

 of it." Similar troubles on a serious scale are now occur- 

 ring over the Cheshire salt mines. The newspapers of a 

 week or two since report that in one of the main thorough- 

 fares of North wich " the foundation of a shop, together with 

 about ten yards of the adjoining footpath, sank into a deep 



