Of the collier boys of Durham and Northumberland, the sub-commissioner reports that an inspection of more than a thousand of these boys convinced him that "as a class, (with many individual exceptions,) their stature must be considered as diminutive."[16] Mr. Nicholas Wood, viewer of Killingworth, &c., states "that there is a very general diminution of stature among pit-men."[17] Mr. Heath, of Newcastle, surgeon to Killingworth, Gosforth, and Coxlodge collieries, "thinks the confinement of children for twelve hours in a pit is not consistent with ordinary health; the stature is rather diminished, and there is an absence of colour; they are shortened in stature."[18] And J. Brown, M. D., Sunderland, states "that they are generally stunted in stature, thin and swarthy."[19] Of the collier population in Cumberland, it is stated that "they are in appearance quite as stunted in growth, and present much the same physical phenomena as those of Yorkshire, comparing, of course, those following similar branches of the work."[20] Thomas Mitchell, surgeon, Whitehaven, says, "their stature is partly decreased."[21] Of the deteriorated physical condition of the collier population in the East of Scotland, as shown, among other indications, by diminished stature, Dr. S. Scott Alison states that "many of the infants in a collier community are thin, skinny, and wasted, and indicate, by their contracted features and sickly, dirty-white or faint-yellowish aspect, their early participation in a deteriorated physical condition. From the age of infancy up to the seventh or eighth year, much sickliness and general imperfection of physical development is observable. The physical condition of the boys and girls engaged in the collieries is much inferior to that of children of the same age engaged in farming operations, in most other trades, or who remain at home unemployed. The children are, upon the whole, prejudicially affected to a material extent in their growth and development. Many of them are short for their years."[22]