EDITORIAL 765 



would become important — important as a signal — if it were talis- 

 manic or were to become talismanic. 



The evolution of the Bureau of Mines from a branch of the 

 national Geological Survey is a historical event of a high order of 

 importance in the progress of science as an aid to human welfare. 

 It is worthy of note that the evolution is coincident with a critical 

 stage in the progress of the chief inquiry to which the bureau has 

 set itself, the protection of life against preventable disaster. The 

 imperative nature of this inquiry has been impressed upon the 

 world by the appalling disasters of 1907. That the main source of 

 such disasters lies in the explosibility of coal dust rather than 

 in explosions of pre-existent gases, and in the improper handling 

 of explosives as the exciting agency, had already been recognized 

 by critical investigators and had been set forth measurably in 

 the literature of the subject, but it had not been accepted widely 

 enough to be effective with those in whose hands the remedy rests. 

 The further work to be done to attain practical success lay in more 

 convincing evidence of the sources of disaster, in the discovery of 

 effective preventives and in such education respecting these as is 

 requisite to their effective adoption, a task at once of research, of 

 invention, of demonstration, and of inculcation, in which each 

 factor is imperative to the success of the whole. 



When the shock of the disasters of the fall of 1907 awakened 

 intense interest in the problem, the initial steps toward finding 

 a method of forestalling such calamities had already been taken 

 in America, following earlier steps of like nature in England, 

 France, Belgium, and Germany; but as yet these had not reached 

 sufficiently impressive demonstrations of the sources of disaster 

 and were occupied with doubtful devices for prevention. The 

 line of preventive measures which now seems the most promising 

 had, indeed, been suggested many years earlier, but on limited 

 grounds. It had failed to be adequately stimulative; indeed it 

 seems to have fallen into practical oblivion. The American 

 movement thus entered an open and urgent field with little more 

 than the handicap of lesser experience and of a younger and busier 

 community. 



With a wise sense of the value of co-operative methods, the 



