“China scourers remove loose flint powder from the baked china, and in doing so, partly by brushing, partly by rubbing with sand paper, they send much flint dust into the atmosphere about them--a dust which is lighter and floats more obstinately in the air in proportion as the earthenware is fine. This dust inhaled into the lungs of the workpeople is a terrible irritant to the bronchial surface which it invades. The women (for the occupation is a female one) soon get habitual shortness of breath, with cough and expectoration; very often they have bleeding from the lungs, sometimes also from the nose, and their chronic disease is from time to time accelerated by more acute catarrhal attacks to which they are particularly subject. Comparatively few china scourers continue long at the employment; those who continue at it become sooner or later asthmatical, those who relinquish it in time are said occasionally to regain perfect health, but for the greater number the mischief is reported to be irretrievable. Against the danger of this occupation scarcely any provision has been made. A scourer who had worked eight years, and was suffering from chronic bronchitis, said that four other scourers who were employed in the same room had died from the effect of the occupation since she had commenced it, and that a fifth was then at the point of death. In a third pottery, a woman who had worked ten years at the occupation asserted that about twelve other scourers in the same shop had died since she entered it. Out of thirteen china scourers belonging to six or seven different potteries, whose evidence was taken, only four were in good health; nine were suffering in consequence of their occupation.” The evils caused by the dust are aggravated by the very close and stuffy atmosphere in which much of the work is carried on.