In most of our collieries one shaft serves for winding up the coal, for the passage of the men up and down, for ventilation, and for drainage by means of the engine-pumps. To answer these various purposes it is subdivided or bratticed by brick or wooden partitions into two, three, or four compartments; but this arrangement is very defective, for the safety of the workmen requires that in every large coal-pit, and indeed in every mine, there should be at least two separate shafts. When the partitions of the single shaft become injured or burnt, which has not unfrequently been the case, the ventilation of the pit may suddenly be deranged, and many lives have thus been endangered. The obstruction of a shaft by the breakage of an engine has caused some of the most appalling tragedies in mining history. On January 10, 1862, the beam of the pumping engine broke at the Hartley Colliery in the Newcastle coalfield, and striking, like a huge catapult, with its enormous weight of forty tons, against the sides of the shaft as it descended, accumulated an enormous mass of rubbish and broken timbers at the depth of 138 yards from the surface. Two hundred and four colliers were thus shut out from all hope of rescue, for no exertion could possibly remove, in time enough to save them, the vast pile of ruins that obstructed their escape to the upper world.
The methods of working, winning, or excavating mineral substances naturally vary, according to the magnitude and direction of the beds, lodes, or seams in which they are contained. With a vein of moderate width, as soon as the preparatory labours have brought the miners to the point of the vein from which the ulterior workings are to ramify, the first object is to divide the mass of ore into solid rectangular compartments by means of oblong galleries, generally pierced ten fathoms below one another, with pits of communication opened up, thirty, forty, or fifty yards asunder, which follow the slope of the vein. These galleries and shafts are usually of the same breadth as the vein, unless when it is very narrow, in which case it is necessary to cut out a portion of the roof or the floor. Such workings serve at once the purposes of mining, by affording a portion of ore, and for the complete investigation of the nature and riches of the vein, a certain extent of which is thus prepared before removing the cubical masses. It is proper to advance first of all in this manner to the greatest distance from the central point which can be mined with economy, and afterwards to remove the rectangular blocks in working back to that point. This latter operation may be carried on in two different ways, by attacking the ore from above or from below. In either case the excavations are disposed in steps, similar to a stair, upon their upper or under side. The first is styled a working in _direct_ or descending steps; the second a working in reverse, or ascending steps. By this method a number of miners are able to proceed simultaneously without interfering with each other.