397 
daily raised is equal to two or three, or even ten times the 
weight of coals daily raised, in deep mines, such as 
Monkwearmouth, 1,590 feet deep, Byhope and Seaham, in 
the county of Durham, Shireoaks and Hucknall Toskard, in 
Nottinghamshire, and the Holmes Colliery, the deepest in 
Yorkshire, the water requiring to be raised from depths of 
350 to 600 yards, is not one-tenth the weight of coal daily 
raised. At Shireoaks it is said to be only 3,000 gallons 
per day, or 2 gallons per minute. 
In some of these shafts the upper strata when passed 
through, and which are now effectually tubbed off, yielded 
water at the rate of 224 gallons per ton, 30 tons per 
minute, 1,800 tons per hour, or 43,200 tons per day. I 
need scarcely add that, had such quantities been met with in 
the lower strata, coal mining, under the circumstances, would 
have been an impossibility. 
We thus see that by the Geological arrangement of faults, 
the miner meets only with the water belonging to an 
isolated section, instead of having to contend with feeders 
due to a whole coal-field. 
Even under such circumstances, the difficulty and expense 
are, in some cases, all but insurmountable ; what, then, would 
they have been without such Geological arrangement of the 
strata ? 
It has been found that in beds of coal lying near the sur- 
face, the most insidious and dangerous enemy to mining, 
inflammable gas, is never, or very rarely, met with ; but in 
penetrating deeper and deeper, it is found that the evolution 
of this gas constantly increases, at least to a certain depth. 
No doubt this is in a great degree due to the intercepting 
agency of faults, on the one hand, preventing the downward 
flow of water, and on the other, the upward flow of gas. 
Hence, as a general rule, it may be said that downward, to a 
certain point, water is met with in abundance, and little or 
