The researches which led to the safety-lamp may be regarded as among the most complete examples of correct inductive experiment in the range of English science, and the result is certainly one of the proudest achievements of physico-chemical research. By merely enveloping the flame of a lamp with a metallic gauze, the labourer in the recesses of the gloomy mine may feel himself secure from that outpouring current of inflammable gas, which has been so often the minister of death; he may walk unharmed through the explosive atmosphere, and examine the intensity of its power, as it is wasted in trifling efforts within the little cage he carries. Accidents have been attributed to the “Davy,” as the lamp is called among the colliers; but they may in most cases be traced to carelessness on the part of those whose duty it has been to examine the lamps, or to the recklessness of the miners themselves. That curious metal, platinum, and also palladium, possesses a property of maintaining a slow combustion, which the discoverer of the safety-lamp proposed to render available to a very important purpose. If we take a coil of platinum wire, and, having made it red-hot, plunge it into an explosive atmosphere of carburetted hydrogen and common air, it continues to glow with considerable brightness, producing, by this very peculiar influence, a combination of the gases, which is discovered by the escape of pungent acid vapours. Over the little flame of the safety-lamp, it was proposed by Davy to suspend a coil of platinum which would be thus kept constantly at a red heat. If the miner became accidentally enveloped in an atmosphere of fire-damp, although the flame of his lamp might be extinguished, the wire would continue to glow with sufficient brightness to light him from his danger, through the dark winding passages which have been worked in the bed of fossil fuel. This very beautiful arrangement has not, however, been adopted by our miners. It is thus that the discoveries of science, although they may appear of an abstract character, constantly, sooner or later, are applied to uses by which some branch of human labour is assisted, the necessities of man’s condition relieved, and the amenities of life advanced.