28 MILLER, BAKER, AND COAL-MINER. 



of the latter. The average length of the lives of the two classes 

 respectively is a further proof of this mistaken view that of the 

 carpenters, joiners, and cabinet-makers being forty-nine years, as 

 compared with thirty-six years of the stone-masons. 



Compare now the operations carried on by the flour-miller with 

 that of the grindstone maker, or of the needle-grinder. The 

 atmosphere of a flour-mill is, certainly, much more dusty than that 

 of the workshop in which grindstone making or needle-grinding 

 goes on, but you will not fail to mark the great disparity in the 

 effects of the different sorts of the dust. In every hundred of 

 sick millers, ten are consumptive, and his average life is forty- 

 seven years. 



The bread-baker is on a parity with the miller as regards his 

 average length of life, but his occupation is less productive of con- 

 sumption. 



While flour-dust is not, in these occupations, a sufficiently 

 powerful factor to make consumption the predominant malady, it, 

 nevertheless, conspires with the unfavourable surroundings of the 

 workmen to produce other ailments scarcely less mischievous. 

 Thus the miller, owing to the draughty nature of the premises in 

 which he is accustomed to work, together with the irritation in- 

 duced in the lungs by the inhaled flour, contracts a liability to 

 acute inflammation of the pulmonary organs, from which, his class 

 suffers in the proportion of twenty in the hundred. The baker 

 again, immured for the most part in an underground workshop, for 

 twelve or fourteen hours a-day, in an over-heated air, laden with 

 flour-dust, often tainted with the poison of coal or sewer-gas, 

 acquires a liability to acute disorders of the air-passages chiefly 

 bronchitis, in the ratio of thirty in the hundred. This, in his case, 

 becomes the predominating and fatal malady. It is interesting 

 and instructive to notice the last-named occupation on this table. 

 It is generally believed that the coal-miner's occupation is one 

 most highly productive of pulmonary disease, and on that supposi- 

 tion, when consumption occurs in the coal-miner, it is designated 

 " miner's-phthisis." I feel bound to state that in my experience 

 hospital and otherwise I have not been able to confirm this 

 prevalent belief, nor do I believe it to be well-founded. 



