By one of those coincidences in which the world of cause and effect abounds, the Fire Marshal of Boston, in the same year in which Joshua Merrill described his fruitless efforts to continue the manufacture of a first-class oil,[598] found it necessary to warn the people against the dangerous stuff they were burning in their lamps. In his report in 1888 he called attention to the fact that one-tenth, nearly, of all the fires in Boston the preceding year had been caused by the explosion of kerosene or by its accidental combustion. He got samples of the oil used in a number of the places where fires had occurred from explosion, and had them analyzed by professors of the Institute of Technology in Boston and of the School of Mines of Columbia College in New York. They found them to be below the quality required by the State. Singularly enough, one of the State oil inspectors, examining similar samples, declared them to be above the standard of the State. The Boston _Herald_, discussing the matter, pointed out that the oil inspectors were paid by the owner of the oil. This, it said, placed inspectors practically under the oil combination, which has ways, it continued, of making things unpleasant for inspectors who make reports unsatisfactory to it. The fire marshal's conclusion in all the cases he investigated of these fires by explosion was: "I have felt warranted in every instance in attributing the blame to the inferior quality of kerosene used."[599] The European protest of 1879 followed close upon the success of the comprehensive campaign of 1878[600] "to overcome competition." The warning from the Fire Marshal of Boston in 1888 and the success of the movement, begun in 1885,[601] to shut the independents of Oil City and Titusville out of Boston and New England came close together. These are not coincidences merely. They are cause and effect.