THE EOYAL ARTILLERY INSTITUTION. 
285 
ing even less protection. This illegal firework making has been greatly- 
checked of late by vigilance on behalf of the Government officials, 
and it is to be hoped that it will disappear almost entirely when new 
regulations are introduced which will facilitate the profitable employment 
of these small firework makers upon sufficiently extensive and properly 
organised premises of large manufactories; thus reducing the temptations 
which have hitherto existed for large vendors to purchase cheap fireworks 
of the poor people who carry on the manufacture illegally, and for the 
latter to convert their dwellings into sources of danger to themselves 
and their neighbours. 
The fearful recklessness with which gunpowder and other explosive 
agents are handled and used by uneducated persons, such as these small 
firework makers, of which there are large numbers in the mining and 
manufacturing districts, and by the most’extensive consumers of powder—■ 
namely, the miners and quarrymen—can scarcely be realised by anyone 
who has not had opportunity to acquire by personal observation a know¬ 
ledge of the state of things. A miner may be seen with his naked lamp 
or tallow candle fixed in his hat or plastered against the rock close to 
the blast-hole he is about to load, pouring the powder into his rough 
measure, or his cartridge case, from the flask produced from a pocket 
which is often also the receptacle of lucifer matches, and at times of a 
half-finished pipe of tobacco (if he has not the pipe actually alight in his 
mouth). Having inserted the charge into the hole, he will proceed with 
the operation of tamping , which consists in ramming debris of the rock 
into the hole as tightly as possible by means of a heavy iron tool and a 
hammer. Grains of powder lying upon the sides of the hole, and some¬ 
times forming a train to the charge at the bottom, are thus frequently sub¬ 
mitted to most violent friction, and it is wonderful that accidents in this 
process of loading are not more frequent; but when, in spite of oft- 
repeated cautioning, the miner proceeds to submit to the same, and some¬ 
times even to more violent treatment a cartridge of gun-cotton, dynamite, 
or other explosive agent ignited more readily than gunpowder by friction 
(and which is tightly confined in the blast-hole by the act of ramming 
with a heavy tool), it is not a matter of surprise that fatal accidents 
should occur during the employment of these substances by the miner, 
although he is exposed to less danger with them when carrying them 
about his person or handling them for actual use, because they are not 
violently explosive in small quantities when unconfined. 
It is, however, more particularly from the fact that there are no regu¬ 
lations forbidding or restricting the making up in dwelling houses of 
blasting cartridges, mining fuzes, and the so-called powder-straws used 
in blasting, that the chief liability to accidental explosions in mining 
districts arises. Miners are constantly in the habit of keeping 
considerable quantities of powder in their dwelling rooms, and making 
up their cartridges or fuzes (straws) at night. In a recent official report 
the Head Constable of Middlesborough stated, <c In one case, at Eston, 
the roof of a house was blown off, and on enquiries being made respecting 
it, the man .... stated that he was tallowing the end of the straw, when 
he put it too near the candle flame, which ignited the straw ; he threw 
the straw away, and it fell into the barrel of powder, which exploded/- 
