34° 



NATURE 



[August 10, ii 



a ready sale for books like the one before us, which treat 

 of a few mining subjects in an elementary manner, and 

 more especially of ventilation, and the chemical and 

 physical properties of the gases that are commonly found 

 in mines. Mr. Bagot has evidently taken considerable 

 pains in amassing his information from various sources, 

 some of them original ; and, if we could only add that he 

 appears to have exercised the same degree of care in 

 placing it before the reader, in a concise and orderly form, 

 we would have little else besides commendation to bestow 

 upon his volume. As it is, however, we regret to observe 

 that the whole book is written in a somewhat discursive 

 and disjointed manner. It contains an impossible geo- 

 logical section on p. 109 ; and nearly every one of its 

 chapters teems with rules and advice for the guidance 

 of all sorts of colliery officials from the engineer 

 to the collier. We had hitherto imagined that the 

 General and Special Rules of the Coal Mines' Regu- 

 lation Act were already wellnigh as complete as our 

 knowledge and experience could make them up to the 

 present time, and we think, therefore, that Mr. Bagot 

 might, without impropriety, have appended to his work 

 copies of those parts of both which have a direct bearing 

 upon his subject, selecting his examples of Special Rules 

 from amongst those which most meet with his approval. ; 

 Instead of pursuing such a simple and commendable ' 

 course, however, he chooses rather to give us his own ' 

 ideas of what these rules ought to have been ; he endea- 

 vours to supply what he considers to be omissions, and 

 he makes many statements of a purely dogmatical 

 character which could not bear the touch of close and 

 careful reasoning. Let us take what he says about the 

 duties of a fireman, at p. 73, as an example : — 



" The fireman's duties are very hazardous. He is a 

 ctmtpetent person solely employed to test the pit for gas. 

 When inflammable gas has been found (and we presume 

 that all viewers will see the propriety of examining before 

 each shift begins work, even where it has not been found) 

 he has to examine the pit once in every shift, or once in 

 every twenty-four hours ; should he find gas, he must 

 report the same in a book kept for the purpose. The Act 

 should have made him post a notice at the pit-head con- 

 taining extracts from the book, showing briefly where gas 

 had been found throughout the mine. He also places 

 ' fire-boards,' or notices of dangerous gas, at the entrance 

 to headings which have been found in his examination to 

 contain it. These boards should be painted red and 

 made easily recognisable to miners who cannot read. 

 Another most responsible duty of the fireman is to act as 

 the ' competent person ' where shots are being fired. No 

 shots should be fired where naked lights are used in the 

 vicinity, as a large volume of gas may exude or be dis- 

 charged after the shot and so become ignited, although 

 the ventilation may be ample ; neither should lamps on 

 Davy's principle be used for the operation, but self- 

 extinguishing lamps, such as Stephenson's or Williamson's 

 safety lamps." 



The advisability, or otherwise, of substituting self- 

 extinguishing safety lamps for those now commonly used 

 is a question that has agitated the mining community on 

 many occasions before now. Our author, however, seems 

 to regard it as almost a question of his own raising, and 

 as he takes it up with such zeal and pursues it with so 

 much avidity, we propose to devote a few words to its 

 discussion. In the preface we find him saying : — 



" Her Majesty's Commissioners appointed to inquire 



into mining accidents in their 1881 Parliamentary Report 

 draw attention to this risk" — the risk attending the use of 

 Uavy and Clanny lamps — " but I think that this report will 

 be but little heeded judging from experience, inasmuch 

 as, on April 25, 1879, I read a paper before the Institution 

 of Mechanical Engineers on the subject, with experiments 

 proving the defects in Davy's lamp and many other 

 modified forms of it in use in mines; and in a work of 

 mine published in 1878, I state the fact that the Davy 

 lamp will explode in an explosive mixture travelling at 

 a velocity of eight feet per second." . . . '' If the Govern- 

 ment will not be convinced of the folly of sanctioning the 

 use of Davy, Clanny, and all non-extinguishing safety- 

 lamps in mines, the only chance to avoid these disastrous 

 explosions is to appeal to the common sense of mining 

 engineers." 



And again — passing over other intermediate references 

 — at page 148 : — 



" I have continually pointed out the danger of using 

 non-extinguishing lamps in fiery mines, and at last the 

 attention of the Government has been called to the 

 danger by the Commissioners, but great blame attaches, 

 to my mind {sic) that this fact was ignored so long." 



It seems to us to be both unjust and unfair on the part of 

 our author to bait the Government after this fashion, inas- 

 much as it was already in possession of a vast mass of infor- 

 mation concerning this formerly much-discussed question, 

 long before he began to write about it. Davy himself knew 

 and pointed out the defect of his lamp nearly seventy 

 years ago. Dr. Pereira made experiments to illustrate the 

 same thing for the information of the Select Committee 

 on Accidents in Mines, which sat in 1835. In their 

 Report, that Committee made most urgent representations 

 on the subject to the Government of their day. At the 

 same time a strong effort was made to introduce Upton 

 and Robert's self-extinguishing safety-lamp, which now 

 exists only as a historical curiosity amongst others of the 

 same kind in the Jermyn Street Museum. In 1850 or 185 1 

 the late Mr. Nicholas Wood revived the question, and 

 made the first experiments we know of, which fixed the 

 velocity at which the explosive air must be travelling 

 before the flame will pass through the wire gauze. From 

 that date until the time of his death, thirteen or fourteen 

 years later, he continued to advocate the adoption of self- 

 extinguishing safety-lamps, choosing Stephenson's for 

 his model. About the year 1866 the North of England 

 Institute of Mining Engineers appointed a Committee to 

 consider the matter. They conducted a splendid series 

 of experiments which literally exhausted the subject, and 

 they published the results in their Transactions. About 

 the same time the Government of Belgium appointed a 

 Commission for the same purpose, who, after continuing 

 experiments intermittently over a period of ten years, 

 made a short report to the King, and the result was the 

 immediate promulgation of a law making the use of 

 Mueseler self-extinguishing safety-lamps compulsory in 

 the mines of that country. Finally we might cite the 

 experiences in France, the reports published under the 

 authority of the Commission du Grisou, which has just 

 brought its labours to a close, the interrogatories addressed 

 by the same authority to the principal mining districts of 

 France, the opinions expressed by the various engineers, 

 the discussions which took place, the conclusions, and the 

 official replies. 



Having all these facts before its eyes, and remembering 



