To meet these isolated cases science is almost powerless. For the most part, they are due to falls of material from the roof of the mine, or some simple accident of that kind, caused by an error of judgment or lack of care on the part of fellow-workmen, and the only safeguard against such is the most careful and systematic supervision, which, in Great Britain at all events, is rigidly applied. The underground staff are very carefully organised with this end in view, and the whole is supervised by Government inspectors. No amount of scientific investigation or invention will help much in these matters. With the explosion or fire, however, it is different, for there subtle forces and strange chemical influences come into play with which science is specially well fitted to deal. To a great many people the first news of organised, trained and scientifically equipped rescue parties came at the time of the terrible Courrières disaster in France, when over 1000 men lost their lives. For then a party with apparatus hurried from Germany and played a prominent part in the rescue operations. But unfortunately the glamour of their performance was somewhat dimmed by the fact that after they had done all they could, and had gone home again, more men were rescued. Many, reading of that fact, were inclined to scoff at the "new-fangled" ideas, thinking that after all the old way of working with a party of brave but untrained and often ignorant volunteers was better than the new way of working with equipped and trained men. It certainly did seem as if the former had succeeded where the latter had failed. But that was quite a mistake, as subsequent events have shown, and in all probability it was due to the fact that the uninstructed party were local men, thoroughly familiar with the mine in which they were working, its geography and its special local conditions, whereas the trained men came from far away. At all events the pioneer work of the Germans in the matter of rescue teams has been amply justified by the fact that other people have copied them, and none more thoroughly than the mining authorities of Great Britain. Indeed we see here another instance of the remarkable way in which the British people, though a little slow to take up a new idea, do take it up when it has once been established, and in such a way that they are soon among the foremost in its use. The Germans, all honour to them, started the rescue teams, but at this moment there are rescue teams and stations for their training in Britain second to none in the world. Of these there is a splendid example in the Rhondda Valley, in South Wales, supported and worked by the owners of the pits in that district, besides others at Aberdare, in the same neighbourhood, at Mansfield, to serve the collieries in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire; indeed rescue stations are now dotted throughout the mining districts.