600 
Mr. Brakenridge was the best — that of going to the far 
end in the first instance, and working towards the drawing 
shaft, because the men were leaving the old workings behind 
them, and when they were escaping from an explosion there 
was a clear road for them to run, between the solid coal, 
instead of along goaves (or old workings) which were 
impregnated with explosive gas and choke-damp, which 
suffocated them as they ran. By the old system of working 
from the down-cast shaft, where one man was burnt by an 
explosion, from twenty to thirty were smothered by the 
choke-damp. Now, in his Whitwood mine, worked upon 
the principle advocated by Mr. Brakenridge, they had had 
no miners smothered, and the most they had ever had killed, 
were two or three at a time. He feared, also, that Mr. 
Brakenridge did not make sufficient allowance for the 
diffusion of gases. But these were points of detail ; and 
he wished specially to impress upon the gentlemen present 
that the safest principle was to begin working the coal at the 
far end, and work towards the drawing pit, and not from it. 
Mr. Crowther expressed his concurrence in the views of 
Mr. Brakenridge. 
Mr. E. Brooke, Jun., objected to the suggestion that 
there should be advance drifts in front of each working, in 
order to release the gas in the coal to be worked, on the 
ground that these advanced drifts would not themselves be 
ventilated, and consequently would be likely to become 
reservoirs of gas. He regarded the principle of leaving the 
sixteen yards banks or pillars between the board-gates until 
the whole of the coal in the wide workings had been won 
as open to objection, and argued that the pressure of the 
superincumbent strata and the falling of the roof would 
render it impossible to get these banks at all. 
Mr. Briggs said this was an objection, no doubt, not only 
from the falling of the roof, but also from the upheaving of 
