128 GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF ALABAMA. 
in long wall mining, and that our miners are mostly accus- 
tomed t» the “pillar and room” system, it is probably best 
to adopt it only where the roof is good, the floor not too 
soft and apt to “swell up,” and where there is abundance 
of hard gob material to give some support to the roof. In 
Warwickshire, England, they mine their medium dip coal 
(from fifteen to twenty degrees), by the “long wall drawing 
method; a full description of which is given by William S 
Gresley in the Engineering and Mining Journal of August 
17th, 1889, and I have no doubt but that it is the most im- 
proved method of mining the medium dip seams now in 
use in Warwickshire, and that it suits their condition of 
mining matters, is very evident. In the first place, they 
have to go to their boundary to commence the withdrawal 
of the coal, while in our case, most of our mine proprietors 
know that even their grandchildren will never extend their 
underground workings to their boundaries; in the second 
place, their small square sided mine cars can be taken be- 
tween the props and the face of the coal, much more readily 
than our cars of the Monongahela pattern; in the third 
place their room tracks have a sawed flat tie, of one and a 
quarter inch thickness, with the ends of the rails locking 
into one another, and with holes in the ties that keep their 
rails in guage, so that they can move their tracks along the 
breast, while we are knocking out the wedges, or drawing 
the spikes of ours. 
While in Europe, some ten years ago, the underground 
system of wire rope haulage received my attention, and I 
devoted several months to a thorough examination of the 
various methods of using it, and found its greatest develop- 
ment in the Wigan district of Lancashire, England. It was 
no new experiment to them, as several of the mine superin- 
tendents informed me that they had abandoned the use of 
pony or mule and trammer, twenty years previous to the 
time of my examination, or now a generation ago. The 
proprietors and managers showed me ropes that they were 
using then, that they had been using constantly under- 
ground the thirteen years prior to that, the rope still good. 
Their underground haulage ropes are made of steel wire, 
with a hemp core. In one pit that had a regular output of 
