Accidents through Farm Machinery. 
353 
stead into a human slaughter-house ; and one can seldom take 
up a daily newspaper without seeing in print an account of some 
fresh disaster caused by such machinery. Although, in the 
absence of statistical figures, isolated observations and impres- 
sions are necessarily vague and controvertible, it is very pro- 
bable that the number of accidents caused by machinery, and 
recorded in the books of infirmary surgeons, would swell into 
a voluminous episode of " the simple annals of the poor." 
At the beginning of last year a correspondent to ' The Times ' 
showed that, during about two years and a half, twenty-three 
amputations had been carried out in the Hereford Infirmary on 
sufferers from machine accidents ; while the number of minor 
cases, not requiring amputation, was even higher during the 
same period. There can be little doubt that similar returns 
from other agricultural districts would show an appalling amount 
of misery from this cause. The " minor " accidents are only less 
in a surgical sense, as a leg or an arm may evidently be dis- 
abled without being cut off. But we need not go far back in the 
annals of the Royal Agricultural Society itself to find instances 
of injuries caused by machinery. At the Battersea Show a bone- 
crushing machine crushed to bits the living bone of its attendant 
up to the shoulder. At the Warwick Show a man lost his life 
while putting the strap on the fly-wheel of a portable engine. 
At the Chester Show the excellent Consulting Engineer of the 
Society was compelled to forbid the working of certain portable 
engines with insufficiently stayed boilers. The ultimate histories 
of these steam mortars are probably recorded in the books of 
some county hospital. 
Three separate classes — one might almost say three separate 
interests — are in direct contact with agricultural machinery. The 
maker who, manufacturing at a great expense of skill and capital, 
naturally wishes to sell his productions at the highest profit ; the 
agriculturist who, on the contrary, wants an efficient machine at 
as cheap a rate as possible ; and, lastly, the operative, who, for 
the time, becomes, as it were, a human link attached to the 
machine. Although our implements are in general not badly 
made, as an immense amount of skill and thought has been spent 
on their construction, neither are English agricultural employers 
over-greedy of gain ; nor farm-labourers utterly careless, still it 
requires but little observation to see that the three classes are — 
sometimes singly, sometimes all three together — to blame ; and 
that although, according to the doctrine of chances, a certain 
percentage of accidents will always happen by the use of ma- 
chinery, the present rate may be much reduced. No greater — 
indeed, no other — objection can be brought against its use. 
If we examine into the originating causes of any disaster we 
