COAL AND COAL-MINING. CHAPTER I. THE USE OF COAL: ITS COMMENCEMENT AND EXTENSION. IN these our modern days, surrounded as we are by coal fires, steam, and coal products, it is somewhat difficult to imagine ourselves in the position of the early writers on natural history, who touched with uncertain pen on what they thought to be the leading characters of a rare and ambiguous mineral. Many of the passages which have been quoted from ancient authors as indicating a knowledge of the use of coal have no reference whatever to the substance to which we now give the name, but indicate simply charcoal, or even wood-fuel'. The translators of the Scriptures have thus employed the word coal in the same sense as the Greek anthrax, the Latin carbo, and the German kohle; the same, in fact, as was usual in our own language, until wood and charcoal came to be supplanted as fuel by their stony relative. Certain varieties of this mineral were noticed by the ancients, although with little idea of the probability of their receiving any extensive application. Thus Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle, in an oft-quoted passage, described, nearly 300 years B.C., a fossil or B stone coal of an earthy character, found in Liguria (now the province of Genoa), and in Elis, on the way to Olympias, capable of kindling and burning like charcoal, and employed by smiths. Ampelitis, a black stone "like bitumen," and Gagates, or jet, are mentioned by Pliny and others as available for medicinal or ornamental purposes; but neither the naturalists who endeavoured to describe the various products of creation, nor the historians who enumerated the sources of wealth of particular countries, leave us the impression of their having seen or heard of a generally useful fossil fuel. It has been attempted to show that the early Britons worked coal; and a stone axe, stated by Pennant to have been found in the out-crop of a coal seam in Wales, has been well-nigh worn out in the service; but we have no satisfactory evidence on the subject prior to the later days of the Roman occupation, when roads had been carried through many of the coalproducing districts. Coal cinders have been found amid the ruins of several of the Roman stations in Durham, Northumberland, and Lancashire, and more recently at Wroxeter, the ancient Uriconium, the destruction of which place dates, according to Mr. Thomas Wright, F.S.A., from the 6th century.* It is not until the thirteenth century that we obtain clear proof that coals were systematically raised for fuel. In 1239 King Henry III. is stated to have granted a charter for this purpose to the townsmen of Newcastleon-Tyne; and so early was the produce of their pits attracted to the devouring focus of London, that by the beginning of the next century great complaint arose on The cinders were still on the ground adjoining the baths when the British Association excursion visited tne spot in September, 1865. the injury done by the coal smoke to the health of the citizens. In 1306, on petition by Parliament, King Edward I., says Stowe, "by proclamation, prohibyted the burneing of sea-coale in London and the suburbs, to avoid the sulferous smoke and savour of the firing; and in the same proclamation commanded all persons to make their fires of wood." Not twenty years, however, passed away before the inevitable consequence of a gradually pressing scarcity of wood followed; the banished "sea-coale" again sailed up the Thames, landed in the capital, and actually effected a lodgment in the royal palace. From that time forth, with a temporary check during the civil wars, the coal trade grew with the growth of the population, especially of London and the east coast, and pari passu with the rapid destruction of the forests. On the Continent the coal basin of Zwickau, in Saxony, appears to have been the earliest known in Germany, and it is said that its working can be carried back to the time of the Sorbenwends, about the tenth century. In 1348 the metal-workers of that town were forbidden to pollute the air with the smoke of coal. In Westphalia coals seem to have been dug near Dortmund as early as 1302. The first mention of coal-mining in Scotland occurs in a grant executed in 1291 in favour of the abbot and convent of Dunfermline. Coal was probably worked on a small scale in several of the English and Welsh districts about this time; and we have the evidence of the quaint old traveller, Marco Polo, to show that the Chinese were at the same epoch well acquainted with its use. "The History of Fossil Fuel." London, 1841. |
