later the new method of conveyance attracted the attention of Roger North, who, writing in 1676, refers to the subject in the following terms :—

"Another thing that is remarkable [at the Newcastle collieries] is their way-leaves, for when men have pieces of ground between the colliery and the river, they sell leave to lead coals over their ground, and so dear that the owner of a rood of ground will expect 207. per annum for this leave. The manner of the carriage is by laying rails of timber from the colliery down to the river, exactly straight and parallel, and bulky carts are made with four rowlets fitting these rails, whereby the carriage is so easy that one horse will draw down four or five chaldrons of coals, and is an immense benefit to coal merchants."

This account seems to indicate a considerable improvement upon the "waggons with one horse " above referred to; the improvement being probably due to the invention of the railway in the interim.

Before railways came into use a prodigious number of carts and wains were required to carry the produce of the Newcastle collieries to the shipping places on the Tyne. The collieries of Kenton and Benwell each employed from four to five hundred; and in 1690, Whickham Colliery had no fewer than six hundred wains in use leading coals to the river.

The Wear district soon followed the example of the Tyne district in the adoption of railways; the new method of conveyance being first applied there, in 1693, by Thomas Allan, Esq., of Newcastle-on-Tyne,

the proprietor of Allan's Flatts Colliery, near Chesterle-Street.

The history of the early use of railways in the coalfields of the South-west is even more obscure than in the case of the North of England. When they first came to be employed in Shropshire we have been unable to discover. Professor Pepper, in his Play Book of Metals, speaks of Coalbrookdale as being "celebrated as the place where railroads formed of wood were first used in the year 1620 and 1650," but without adducing any evidence in support of the

statement.

They were introduced into South Wales by the ingenious Sir Humphry Mackworth, who had one · already constructed at his colliery at Neath, in Glamorganshire, in 1698. This railway, after being about eight years in use, was declared by the grand jury at Cardiff to be a nuisance, and a portion of it crossing the highway between Cardiff and Neath was torn up and the rails cut in pieces. In some evidence brought forward (about 1706) to rebut the presentment of the Cardiff jury, it is set forth that—

"These waggon-ways are very common and frequently made use of about Newcastle, and also at Broseley, Benthal, and other places in Shropshire, and are so far from being nuisances that they have ever been esteemed very useful to preserve the roads, which would be otherwise made very bad and deep by the carriage of coal in common waggons and carts."

F

Not only had Sir Humphry Mackworth introduced the most improved methods of conveyance for his coal, but a number of other novelties were to be found at his collieries and copper-works at Neath. As early as 1698 he was employing coal in the smelting of copper. He also had several schemes for enlisting the force of the wind in his service, and had invented "new sailing waggons for the cheap carriage of his coal to the water-side, whereby one horse does the work of ten at all times, but when any wind is stirring one man and a small sail does the work of twenty." He had in like manner set up "sailing engines," or wind-mills, for other purposes. As Yalden says of him in his poem:

"The winds, thy slaves, their useful succour join,
Convey thy ore, and labour at thy mine."

But among the various productions of the genius of Sir Humphry Mackworth, vastly the most important in a mining point of view was "his new method of coffering out the water from his shafts and sinkingpits, and thereby preventing the charges of waterengines." Waller tells us that by this means Sir Humphry succeeded in recovering a large vein of coal which had been in vain attempted by other artists. This seems to be the earliest notice we have of the invaluable process of damming out water from coal-pits by means of a water-tight lining, termed

in the North of England tubbing, from the circumstance of its having originally consisted of a frame of wooden staves like the sides of a tub. This excellent invention, already important at this time as the shafts were becoming deeper, has become infinitely more the present day. Indeed, without a system of keeping the water out of the shafts in this way, the working of deep seams of coal lying under very wet strata would in many cases be altogether impracticable.

So at

CHAPTER VII.

NOXIOUS GASES PREVALENT IN THE MINES.-ACCIDENTS OCCASIONED THEREBY.-SMALL EXPLOSIONS OF FIREDAMP BECOME FREQUENT.

"And oft a chilling damp or unctuous mist,

Loosed from the crumbling caverns, issues forth,
Stopping the springs of life

To cure this ill

A philosophic art is used to drain

The foul imprison'd air, and in its place
Purer convey."

-JAGO.

WHILST water was the chief enemy with which the miners had to contend during the era under consideration, it was not the only one. As the mine workings receded further and further from the surface, the supply of air arising from natural ventilation gradually ran short, and noxious gases became a source of increasing trouble and danger.

During the middle ages phenomena connected with the atmosphere of mines which were beyond the com