Colliery Ventilation

Abstract

DURING the last ten years, or, ever since it has become necessary for colliery managers to obtain certificates of competency by examination, there has been a ready sale for books like the one before us, which treat of a few mining subjects in an elementary manner, and more especially of ventilation, and the chemical and physical properties of the gases that are commonly found in mines. Mr. Bagot has evidently taken considerable pains in amassing his information from various sources, some of them original; and, if we could only add that he appears to have exercised the same degree of care in placing it before the reader, in a concise and orderly form, we would have little else besides commendation to bestow upon his volume. As it is, however, we regret to observe that the whole book is written in a somewhat discursive and disjointed manner. It contains an impossible geological section on p. 109; and nearly every one of its chapters teems with rules and advice for the guidance of all sorts of colliery officials from the engineer to the collier. We had hitherto imagined that the General and Special Rules of the Coal Mines' Regu lation Act were already wellnigh as complete as our knowledge and experience could make them up to the present time, and we think, therefore, that Mr. Bagot might, without impropriety, have appended to his work copies of those parts of both which have a direct bearing upon his subject, selecting his examples of Special Rules from amongst those which most meet with his approval. Instead of pursuing such a simple and commendable course, however, he chooses rather to give us his own ideas of what these rules ought to have been; he endea vours to supply what he considers to be omissions, and he makes many statements of a purely dogmatical character which could not bear the touch of close and careful reasoning. Let us take what he says about the duties of a fireman, at p. 73, as an example:—

The Principles of Colliery Ventilation.

By Alan Bagot, &c. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co., 1882.)