The wonders of the world : $b a complete museum, descriptive and pictorial, of the wonderful phenomena and results of nature, science and artAbbott, John Loraine
Science
The wonders of the world : $b a complete museum, descriptive and pictorial, of the wonderful phenomena and results of nature, science and art
Abbott, John Loraine
Curiosities and wonders
At the crane twenty-one bodies lay in ghastly confusion: some like
mummies, scorched as dry as if they were baked. One wanted its head,
another an arm. The scene was truly frightful. The power of fire was
visible upon them all; but its effects were extremely variable: while
some were almost torn to pieces, there were others who appeared as if
they had sunk down overpowered with sleep. The ventilation concluded on
Saturday the nineteenth of September, when the ninety-first body was dug
from under a heap of stones. At six o’clock in the morning the pit was
visited by candle-light, which had not been used in it for the space of
one hundred and seventeen days; and at eleven o’clock in the morning the
tube furnace was lighted. From this time the colliery has been regularly
at work; but the ninety-second body has never yet been found. All these
persons, except four, who were buried in single graves, were interred in
Heworth chapel-yard, in a trench, side by side, two coffins deep, with a
partition of brick and lime between every four coffins.
Having thus glanced at some of the coal mines of Great Britain, we now
pass to some of those of the United States. In these coal is found in
_four_ different forms: _first_, the _genuine_ anthracite, or _glance_
coal, as near Worcester, Mass., and Newport, R. I.; _second_, coal
destitute of bitumen, commonly called anthracite, but which is more
properly anasphaltic, which is found at Pottsville, Mauch Chunk,
Lackawanna, Wilkesbarre, &c.; _third_, bituminous coal, usually found in
the slate rock, as at Tioga, Lycoming, etc.; and _fourth_, the lignite
coal, found along the south shore of the bay of South Amboy, New Jersey.
From the state of Alabama to Pictou, Nova Scotia, the coal beds can be
followed in a north-east direction, for fifteen hundred miles; and from
Richmond, in Virginia, to Rock River, in Illinois, they are continually
crossed at right angles, for about eight hundred miles. At Richmond, the
coal is bituminous; on the Alleghany belt, it is anthracite. Geologists
think that the anthracite was lifted out of its horizontal position when
the great Alleghany belt was upheaved, and that its non-bituminous
quality is owing to the influence of the intense heat that accompanied
its upheaval.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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