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In New Jersey it is provided that engines must have screens, and the 
fact of fire is made prima facie evidence of the violation of the law. 
The exposure of the railroad companies to complaints on account of 
fires originated by their locomotives, and to suits at law for damages, 
as well as other reasons appealing to their self-interest, have led to 
many and protracted experiments for the purpose of preventing dam 
age to property arising from this source and inconvenience to pas- 
sengers. Many contrivances for this purpose have been tried. Some 
have been, in a degree, successful, but most of them have proved fail- 
ures in practice. Within a few years, however, spark-arresters have 
been devised which railroad engineers and managers declare to be 
so efficient in securing the end desired that it would seem to be imposiug 
no hardship on the railroad companies to compel them by law to fur- 
nish all their locomotives, as a condition of their use, with one or another 
of these safeguards. An eminent expounder of the English common 
law says that though railway companies may be expressly authorized 
by statute to use locomotive furnaces of a dangerous character, u no 
statute can exempt them from the consequences of negligence in the 
management of their railways, or the construction of their fire-boxes, 
chimneys, or furnaces whereby coals of fire are thrown on the adjoin- 
ing property. If they neglect to avail themselves of all such contri- 
vances as are in known practical use to prevent the emission of sparks 
from their engines, they will be responsible for such neglect, and if they 
run locomotives without statutable authority, in that case they are re- 
sponsible for any damage caused by such engines in setting fire to 
adjoining property or otherwise, although they have not been guilty of 
negligence." 
It would seem that our interpretation of the common law should be as 
effective as that of England in protecting property from destruction by 
fires originating from passing locomotives, or that our statute laws 
should be made to accomplish the same end. 
SMOKE-CONSUMING DEVICE FOR LOCOMOTIVES.* 
By J. N. Lauder, 
Superintendent of Motive Power, Old Colony Eailroad. 
In presenting this paper on smoke-consuming devices for locomotives, it is not my 
purpose to enter into the details of the mechanical construction of the various devices 
that have been experimented with in a practical way during the last thirty years, or, 
to speak more accurately, ever since the locomotive was brought into existence, but 
to give, in a general way, what has been done in the past and what is being done at 
the present time to mitigate the evils of the discharge of unconsumed products of 
combustion from the chimney of the locomotive. 
* Reprinted from the Proceedings of the American Forestry Congress at Boston, 
Mass., 1885. 
