There was in England, especially in the north and midland counties, a great and crying evil--the danger in which our miners and their families lived, as these brave men daily and hourly carried their lives in their hands. Constantly the newspapers were filled with terrible accounts of accidents in our coal-pits--mines exploding, men and boys and horses being blown to pieces or buried alive--and always from the same cause--the want of a safety lamp. A great quantity of gas got cooped up, in spite of contrivances for leading pure air into the murky passages of the mines, and these gases, directly they came in contact with a naked flame, exploded. There had been old days in which men worked by a feeble light borrowed from the phosphorescence of decaying fish-skins or "steel mills," which gave out fitful gleams or sparks when a piece of flint was struck against them; but these days had passed, and accidents multiplied. And though men were startled and shocked when they read of them, still the wholesale slaughter went on. The gas exploded, bursting up everything near, killing the miners, erupting great masses of coal and dust and mangled men and horses. And not only this, but it blew down the trap-doors, leaving men to die of "after-damp," the more horrible death of suffocation, because lingering and slow. To remedy this crying evil Davy bent the whole force of his brilliant intellect, and after much thought invented the Safety Lamp. He surrounded the flame of his lamp with wire gauze. The gas entered and exploded within it, but the explosion did not pass outward. It was the most glorious triumph of his genius. In 1816 it was adopted. With his "Davy" in his hand there was now no fear for the miner. "The highest ambition of my life," he wrote, "has been to deserve the name of a friend to humanity." He took out no patent. He wanted no money for it. It was reward enough for him to see it work. "If you had patented it," said a friend to him one day, "you might have been drawing your five or ten thousand a year." "No, my good friend," was his reply, "I never thought of such a thing. My sole object was to serve the cause of humanity. It might undoubtedly enable me to put four horses in my carriage, but what would it avail me to have it said that Sir Humphrey drives his carriage-and-four?" "I value it," he said again, "more than anything I ever did." And now the world's honours waited upon him. In 1818 Government made him Baronet. In 1820 he was made President of the Royal Society. But already in the zenith of his triumph, there were small signs that showed too surely that he was failing. In 1826 he retired from the Presidentship, and later in the year he was attacked by apoplexy, followed by paralysis. "Here I am," he wrote pathetically from Rome, "a ruin among ruins." And so he began to look death in the face.