Scenes And Incidents From The Life Of A Practical Miner
With A Treatise On The Ventilation Of Coal Mines

17 in the County of Durham, there would have been no explosion there in 1850. Such is the deceptive and precarious state of goaves, that we should never conclude that because they are clean and safe to-day they must be so to-morrow. They are always subjected to changes of atmos- phere, and must be ventilated by scientific skill. I may tell you, by the way, that the workings of the two pits at Coxlodge were of great extent, and abounded with, hydrogen gas, which made them always critical and difficult to deal with. As a proof of this, it may be men’ tioned that when the general current of air returned to the furnace and up-cast pit, it was so seriously vitiated with poisonous ingi'edients, that five men in succession, employed as onsetters at the bottom of this pit, inhaling the pernicious atmosphere twelve hours each day, died from its effects, and became absolutely putrified before life was extinct. On one occasion, two men were engaged in examining and repairing the shaft, and so suddenly did it operate on them that one of them, died in the cage, and the other was seriously affected, but recovered. The conse- quence was that we were obliged to bring a portion of fresh air direct on to the furnace to enable it to burn, and allow us to keep up an efficient state of ventilation. Still further to illustrate the principle of ventilation that I recommend to your notice, I take next the explosion that occurred in the St. Hilda Pit at South Shields Colliery, in 1839. And here again, I wish it to be understood that my intention is not to cast a reflection upon any person whatever, but to hold up to your view a preventative system of ven- tilating a mine, whereby a similar occurrence, so dreadful to reflect on, may not take place again in the coal trade. You will see that neither agent nor officials were in the slightest degree culpable in that calamitous accident at St. Hilda’s, as the system of coursing the air through the waste in conjunction with the whole working places, was pre valent throughout the coal trade at that time. Consequently, the same, or a similar catastrophe might have happened at any other colliery abounding with hydrogen gas. That system of air courses was false in principle; for Nature’s laws are uniform, unalterable, inimitable, linked as it were by a vast chain of circumstances; and he that deviates from those laws, whatever link lie strike, ten or ten-thousandth, as Pope says, breaks the chain alike. We will now take our stand at the south-east corner of the accompanying section, or supposed plan of the workings. You see a pair of winning headways going north, to the extent of a slieth of boards, fourteen in number, with nine pillars finished, and the tenth nearly so, to west. You also see three advance boards going west, the middle one being the horse and air-way. Now follow the darts as indicators of the air’s course through the workings and waste. You will observe that the air goes up the south advance boards, and as it returns, passes through the barrier wall, thirty yards thick, as a provision for the pillar working. You will see that it airs the first three working boards to west first; and as it returns, it is borne down by a door in the wall, between the third and fourth boards. It passes by the end of a brattice in the third board (the other two having each a deal stopping in them), when it is again spread across the three by the wasteman, and conveyed down east to the c