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furnace and mechanical ventilation, Coal getting and Coal- 
breaking machines, safety lamps and explosions, and accidents 
generally, the lighting of Coal mines, and underground haul- 
age, and any other information which either the geologist, 
chemist, or engineer has the opportunity of collecting, thereby 
mutually assisting each other in our efforts to mitigate, in 
every possible way, the commercial uncertainty and physical 
dangers which too often are associated with the subject the 
writer has selected on the present occasion. 
BRITISH PIT DWELLINGS IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF DONCASTER, 
BY THE REV. SCOTT F. SURTEES, M.A., SPROTBRO. 
I am about to treat of a subject of interest to one and all — 
by some it would be called an era pre-historic — to point out 
to you how the earlier races who inhabited this island 
defended themselves from the rains and frost of this unequal 
climate, how they banded themselves together in tribes for 
mutual security and family life. I am about to speak of 
their dwellings, at a time when the wild beasts roamed 
through the vast forests of this part of the country ; when 
the deer, and the wild boar, and herds of British cattle 
wandered in droves amongst heaths, woods, and marsh-lands. 
Professor Phillips' "Yorkshire," the highest authority we have, 
states as follows, p. 187: "We find the great Irish elk, the 
red deer, the fallow deer, the bos longifrons, the common ox, 
the goat, the sheep, the horse, the boar.'' Yet the tribes 
who inhabited these sea-coast districts were far from savages. 
They traded with their neighbours, bartered their com- 
modities, they worked and smelted iron, they had metal rings 
for money, they had chariots and darts. Of the tribes of 
Britain one of the most important, if not the most im- 
portant, were the Brigantes ; the regions peopled by them 
