148 On Spontaneous Combustion. 
month of August. This coal also was doubtless from Virginia. A 
similar accident has recently occurred in the coal yard of Nutter & 
Co., New York, to sixty tons of Virginia coal. (July, 1837.) , 
Mr. Dupont, the late extensive manufacturer of gunpowder, in- 
formed Dr. Seybert, that charcoal was also lable to spontaneous 
combustion when in powder and piled ina heap. He had suffered 
loss from this cause, and a similar accident had occurred near Paris. 
The French commissioners charged by the French government 
to examine into the causes of the explosions of powder factories, 
ascertained that charcoal in the lump, by attrition took fire. Char- 
coal inflames according to M. Caussigni, by the pressure of mill- 
stones, and has taken fire in the box of the bolter, into which it had 
been sifted ; the coarse powder experienced no alteration.— Annales 
de Chimie, No. 35. 
Mr. Sage saw the roof of one of the low wings of the mint at Paris 
set on fire by the spontaneous combustion of a large quantity of char- 
coal that had lain in the garrets. 
Two instances of spontaneous combustion took place in the pow- 
der manufactory of Essone, in the year eight and ten of the French, 
republic ; the first in the box for sifting the charcoal, and the sec- 
ond in the charcoal repository. Bartholdi attributes them to phos- 
phorus in the charcoal. 
May not one or more of the conflagrations of powder mills, which 
have taken place in the United States during the two past years, 
have been caused in this way? 
Linen, cotton, and woolen cloth, or the raw materials of these 
fabrics impregnated with flax-seed oil, or paint, or varnish, have fre- 
quently proved the causes of spontaneous inflammation, ~ 
Several years since a piece of canvass, forty yards in length, 
painted with white lead and oil, and exposed to the sun for some 
hours, was rolled up and put under cover. The next morning it 
was found smoking, and the whole except a yard, burnt to cinder, 
with a hole through the bottom of a wagon. ‘This happened at 
Mount Pleasant, Virginia. A large piece of coarse muslin, thor- 
‘ oughly oiled for the purpose of making covers for boxes, was left 
over night, folded loosely in a shed in a yard in Market street, Bos- 
ton; in the morning, it was found burnt entirely through, and about 
to blaze. (1831.) 
A quantity of wool prepared with the usual proportion of oil for 
earding, and thrown into a heap in the evening, was found the next 
