PROFESSOR OF COAL MINING AT THE VICTORIA UNIVERSITY, YORKSHIRE COLLEGE, LEEDS: COUNTY COUNCIL SELECTED MINING CLASS, DERBY; EXAMINER IN MINE SURVEYING, CITY AND GUILDS CENTRAL INSTITUTION, LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 1904 All rights reserved THIS treatise is prepared exclusively for the use of beginners and for those who wish to teach beginners, or as a handy reference-book for busy men whose excess of knowledge and experience causes them sometimes to forget their early lessons. Still, the author must appeal to the good-natured forbearance of the reader, on account of the many shortcomings and imperfections of this little work. He has found great difficulty in compressing into the space at his disposal even the briefest reference to many subjects which have to be noticed in an elementary treatise on Practical Mining. He has also found it hard, in the midst of his practical engagements, to find time for any literary work. He would like, however, to assure the reader that he has not ventured into print without endeavouring, so far as it was possible to him by labour and study, to prepare himself for the task. In his thirty-three years' experience in practical mining, he has been officially connected with mines as consulting mining engineer, colliery manager, and surveyor in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire, South Wales, North Wales, and Staffordshire. He has also from time to time inspected mines in Lancashire, Durham, Northumberland, Devon, Anglesea, and Scotland; and has visited many mines abroad in France, Germany, Austria, and in the United States of America. He is not only acquainted with coal-mines, but has experience of mines of clay, stone, iron, lead, zinc, copper, tin, gold, silver, and slate. For the last twenty-three years he has been responsible manager of coal-mines, and for the last eighteen years instructor and professor at the Yorkshire College. He has had charge of various sinking operations, and has made the working drawings for most kinds of plant and machinery required at a colliery; and has had to fix the price of all kinds of labour at collieries. He has also worked as a miner both at coal-getting and sinking. This has enabled him the more highly to appreciate the labours and writings of other engineers, to whose instruction he owes most of the information contained in this book. He has derived great assistance from the records of the pro |