COAL-MINING 
upon great hope of benefit, come into this Country to hazard AD. 1689 
their monies in Coale-Pits. Master Beaumont, a Gentleman 
of great ingenuity, and rare parts, adventured into our Mines ig 
with his thirty thousand pounds; who brought with him Suction of 
many rare Engines, not known then in these parts, as the a 
Art to Boore with, Iron Rodds, to try the deepnesse and 
thicknesse of the Coale, rare Engines to draw Water out 
of the Pits; Waggons with one Horse to carry down Coales 
from the Pits, to the Stathes, to the River etc. Within 
few years, he consumed all his money and Rode home upon 
his Light Horse.” Early in the seventeenth century, Lindsay, 
the father of the first Earl of Balcarres, obtained a patent for 
an engine for pumping water out of mines’. Fire engines 
were apparently in use for this purpose in the middle of the 
eighteenth century? and an improved pump is mentioned in 
1778% Brand notes an important invention in 1753, when 
Michael Menzies devised a machine for raising the coal 
by balancing it against a bucket of water, and effected 
a considerable saving in labour 
A fresh impetus was given to this growing trade, when 
the smelting and working iron, with this form of fuel. became 
1 Arnot, Hist. of Edinburgh, 67, note. 
2 They were used for pumping water from tin and copper mines in 1741 
(14 Geo. II. c. 41). 
8 It is not a little curious to find that the prospective expansion of coal- 
mining, to meet the requirements of the iron-trade, was the cause of some little 
anxiety in Scotland. It was said that the demand due to blast furnaces would be 
so great as to raise miners’ wages enormously, and thus enhance the price of coal 
nsed for domestic purposes. The argument seems to assume that colliers were 
a special class and could not be readily recruited from outside, which was of 
course, to a great extent, true. (See p. 531 below.) * Five blast furnaces will require 
262 colliers and miners; formerly employed in preparing collieries for work, or 
in working coals for the domestic consumption of the inhabitants of Scotland. 
This evil is only beginning to be felt, it being certain, from the present high price 
and great demand for cast iron, * * that twenty additional blast furnaces will be 
erected in Scotland within the space of ten years from the present date, requiring 
a supply of 2,048 colliers and miners. This supply of hands must either be drawn 
from the collieries now working coal for the consumption of the inhabitants of 
Scotland,—in which case coal will increase in price above any calculation now 
possible to be made ;—or, erectors of ironworks must be compelled to breed hands 
for their works, by being prohibited * * from employing any colliers now employed 
at the collieries.” Reports, ete. 1871, xvi. 847. 
4 One man and the machine could do the work of three shifts of two horses 
each driven by two boys. Brand, op. cit. 1m, 308. See also a Treatise upon Coal 
Mines, 1769 (Brit. Mus. 117. n. 28], p. 100.