NATURE 



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THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 



A HISTORY OF COAL MINING. 

 Annals of Coal Mining and the Coal Ttade. By R. L. 

 Galloway. Pp. xii + 533. (London : The Colliery 

 Guardian Co., Ltd., 1898.) 



THE scientific study of any art or industry demands, 

 almost as a matter of necessity, that its history 

 should not be neglected, for it is only when its mode of 

 evolution has been clearly traced that the principles upon 

 which it depends can be thoroughly understood. The 

 proper scientific training of the coal miner is a subject 

 that is at present engaging the attention of a large 

 number of those interested in this branch of industry, 

 and to all these Mr. R. L. Galloway's history of coal 

 mining — for such his work really is — will come as a 

 welcome educational weapon ; nor will it prove any the 

 less valuable because it has obviously been written 

 without any specific intention of applying it to this 

 purpose. 



The author's object has simply been to write a history 

 of the coal trade in Great Britain, and to trace the 

 gradual rise and progress of coal mining from its small 

 and almost accidental beginnings to the present gigantic 

 industry employing directly something like three-quarters 

 of a million of workers, and producing over two hundred 

 millions of tons of coal annually, so that, although no 

 record of its existence can be traced before the twelfth 

 century, the coal trade at the end of the nineteenth 

 may fairly be looked upon as the chief source of 

 England's wealth and the mainstay of her greatness. 

 Obviously enough, such a history cannot fail to be of 

 fascinating interest from almost every point of view, 

 and although Mr. Galloway is by no means the first who 

 has attempted to sketch it, his work compares favour- 

 ably with those of his predecessors ; moreover, it is evident 

 that it has been to him a labour of love, and that he has 

 spared neither time nor trouble in collecting information 

 bearing upon his subject, from all available sources. 



In the earlier portion of the record, very much is 

 guess-work, and we get little that is definite or clear 

 before the beginning of the fourteenth century. 

 Incidentally it may be noted that Mr. Galloway's 

 derivation of the word " mine " from " an Eastern root 

 signifying weight," can hardly be endorsed. Its real 

 derivation seems to be from the Low Latin word " minare," 

 meaning to lead or drive, derivatives of which are found 

 in such words as " prominent " and the French 

 " mener " ; it would thus seem that etymologically the 

 word "mine "was identical in meaning with the more 

 modern " lode " or " lead," and was originally applied to 

 a deposit of mineral as distinguished from the mineral 

 itself Numerous entries concerning the digging, and 

 occasionally even the selling of coal, before the end of 

 the fourteenth century, seem to have been disinterred, and 

 it is curious to note that most of them are from ecclesi- 

 astical records ; indeed the Bishops of Durham seem to 

 have been, if not the very first, certainly among the first 

 of the great coal-owners of the country, a circumstance 

 that may perhaps be due to the ease with which coal 

 NO. 1528, VOL. 59] 



was got originally at the outcrops of the numerous fine 

 seams of the great Northern coal field. Mr. Galloway 

 remarks on the meagreness of the records in other 

 parts of England compared with what there is known 

 respecting this one. 



It is worth mentioning that there exists at Durham a 

 lease a little earlier than any quoted by Mr. Galloway, 

 bearing the date, namely, of 1325 ; this curious document 

 shows that coal mining must already have reached a 

 certain stage of development, as it draws a distinction 

 between "pykemen" and " schafteman." During the 

 next two centuries comparatively little is heard of the 

 technical aspect of coal mining, but a great deal of its 

 commercial development, which was not a little 

 influenced by the rapidly increasing employment of 

 this fuel for domestic purposes, .^s pointed out by the 

 author, the close of the sixteenth century marks a 

 definite epoch in coal mining, in that it corresponds 

 approximately with the exhaustion of the greater part 

 of the coal lying above the natural water-level, so that 

 the mineral had now to be wrought at depths below the 

 level of the water, and the necessity for combating this 

 formidable enemy was now beginning to make itself 

 severely felt. What was destined to be the most 

 important event of the seventeenth century was, however, 

 the commencement then made to construct railways with 

 flanged wheels for the more ready carriage of coal from 

 the pits to the shipping places, an idea which, seemingly 

 of the smallest importance, was the true germ whence 

 sprang later on the invention of railways, an invention 

 destined to revolutionise not the coal trade alone, but the 

 aspect of the whole civilised world. It was not, however, 

 till the next century that the steam engine was invented ; 

 originally used for the purpose of unwatering collieries, 

 its increasing application to all branches of industry 

 caused the demand for coal to advance by leaps and 

 bounds. Mr. Galloway has rightly, therefore, interwoven 

 the history of the steam engine with that of coal mining ; 

 it would, indeed, have been difficult to have separated 

 them, and the history of one is to a great extent the 

 history of the other. An event of the utmost import- 

 ance in the development of the coal trade was the 

 success attained by Abraham Darby, about 1730, in 

 smelting pig-iron with coke ; Mr. Galloway certainly 

 mentions the fact, but does not lay the stress upon it 

 which its importance would appear to merit, nor does 

 he even record the name of the man to whose energy 

 and perseverance ultimate success was due after a century 

 of failures. Nor, again, is anything like sufficient weight 

 given here to Neilson's invention of the hot blast, a 

 century later. 



These two monumental improvements in the art of 

 iron-making, firstly by stimulating enormously the 

 demand for coal, and secondly by supplying the mining 

 engineer cheaply with the constructive materal which he 

 needed for his machinery, contributed in a degree 

 second only to the invention of the steam engine, to 

 the rapid expansion of the coal mining industry. As 

 said above, the history of coal mining is to a great 

 extent that of the steam engine ; but neither chronicle is 

 complete until it is supplemented by that of the 

 manufacture of iron, and perhaps the only serious fault 



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