508 Effects attending the Blowing up 
heard of me last at Middleton limekilns, breaking stones 
‘and picking up petrifactions of various kinds: you must now 
follow me a little further north, to Stobs’s Powder Mill. 
It was no powder mill when first I knew it, but a barley mill; 
it has, however, been a celebrated powder manufactory for the 
last thirty years. I could give you many accounts of the many 
explosions of these pow der mills, and of the many deaths occa- 
sioned by them; but this would not properly belong to natu- 
ral history, as the deaths were any thing but natural deaths, 
else I * could some tales unfold would harrow up thy soul :” 
such as Mr. Hunter, one of the proprietors, being struck 
by a stone on the shoulder, which carried off his naked arm 
to a great distance, without shattering the sleeve of his coat 
much; and how his arm was not missed till he was carried 
into his house, set in his chair, and his friends endeavouring 
to bathe his face and hands in cold water! And how another 
man was burnt so that he kept begging his friends to unbut- 
ton his clothes for hours after there were neither clothes nor 
skin on him; and how he lived from eight o’clock in the 
morning till six in the evening, in this state, before he died ! 
And how his companion was blown into so many pieces that 
his heart and liver were found in different fields ! — his 
tongue was found on a door-step some distance from the 
other fragments of his head! This was looked upon by some 
as a summary punishment for profane swearing, as that unfor- 
tunate tongue had been much addicted to suth abomination : 
for my own part, I cannot see that the tongue was any more 
unfortunate or severely punished than the other parts of his 
body. But all this, as I said before, has nothing to do with 
natural history, only it may serve as a prelude to what I may 
suggest respecting the geology of the earth ; and I must join 
felo) 
with Shakspeare’s fop, and say, 
“ It is a pity, so it is, 
That villanous saltpetre should be dige’d 
Out of the bowels of the harmless earth,” &c. 
But Iam going to infer that the bowels of the earth may not be 
so harmless as it is generally supposed; for accumulations of this 
same villanous saltpetre may, by a natural process of chemis- 
try, at certain ages of the earth, explode, and shatter the whole 
or a part of this globe, and ther eby produce the various phe- 
nomena of geology which so much puzzle us poor sand-blind 
mortals. Nevertheless, this supposition does not answer all 
my notions for the phenomena of geology. We must know 
that there are myriads of globes in the universe besides ours ; 
some of them may be more overcharged with saltpetre, or 
