II. THE superficial observer, in noting the real progress made during the last few years in the facility and success with which the electric light has been utilised in a remarkable variety of directions, might have been pardonably led to the conclusion that there existed no very great difficulties in the way of at once presenting the miner with an electric light in almost as portable a form as a safety lamp—incomparably safer than the best of these—and capable of affording a much superior light for the entire duration of his longest working hours underground. A little inquiry into the subject demonstrated to the Royal Commission that such a cnclusion would be at least very premature, and that, although the subject was one most worthy of patient pursuit, the attainment of really useful results was beset with formidable difficulties. It is one thing to announce in oracular fashion, as the Times did, in a leading article last June, “that collieries ought to be lighted in a way to dispense with safety lamps,” and “that electricity is the one illuminating medium which can supply the light which miners want, without the flame which endangers them.” It is quite another thing to apply the electric light with safety, even along main roadways, in mines in which fire-damp is prevalent. The writer of those lines would have been less confident in his assertions had he sought sufficient information to teach him that the fracture of a glow-lamp, or the rupture of a conducting wire in a mine, might be as much fraught with danger as the injury of a safety lamp or the lighting of a pipe. Had he, moreover, but learned by simple inquiry what progress had been made by patient workers (at the time he was inspired thus to write), towards setting aside those sources of danger and providing the miner with a portable and efficient self-contained lamp, he would certainly have hesitated to assert that “no proper zeal has been brought to bear upon the conquest of difficulties” in the application of electric lighting in mines, or to sneer at “the scientific brains, whom the public may encourage, though it cannot compel, to exert themselves as keenly for the illumination of a murky, dirty coal-pit, as in the transformation of a plot of ground in South Kensington into fairyland.”