2l6

BOOK VI.

they do not descend into the shafts nor enter the tunnels again before Monday,and in the meantime the poisonous fumes pass away.

There are also times when a reckoning has to be made with Orcus, 24for some metalliferous localities, though such are rare, spontaneouslyproduce poison and exhale pestilential vapour, as is also the case with someopenings in the ore, though these more often contain the noxious fumes.In the towns of the plains of Bohemia there are some caverns which,at certain seasons of the year, emit pungent vapours which put out lightsand kill the miners if they linger too long in them. Pliny, too, has lefta record that when wells are sunk, the sulphurous or aluminous vapourswhich arise kill the well-diggers, and it is a test of this danger if a burninglamp which has been let down is extinguished. In such cases a second wellis dug to the right or left, as an air-shaft, which draws off these noxiousvapours. On the plains they construct bellows which draw up these noxiousvapours and remedy this evil ; these I have described before.

Further, sometimes workmen slipping from the ladders into the shaftsbreak their arms, legs, or necks, or fall into the sumps and are drowned ;often, indeed, the negligence of the foreman is to blame, for it is his specialwork both to fix the ladders so firmly to the timbers that they cannot breakaway, and to cover so securely with planks the sumps at the bottom of theshafts, that the planks cannot be moved nor the men fall into the water;wherefore the foreman must carefully execute his own work. Moreover,he must not set the entrance of the shaft-house toward the north wind,lest in winter the ladders freeze with cold, for when this happens the men'shands become stiff and slippery with cold, and cannot perform their officeof holding. The men, too, must be careful that, even if none of these thingshappen, they do not fall through their own carelessness.

Mountains, too, slide down and men are crushed in their fall and perish.In fact, when in olden days Rammelsberg, in Goslar, sank down, so manymen were crushed in the ruins that in one day, the records tell us, about400 women were robbed of their husbands. And eleven years ago, partof the mountain of Altenberg, which had been excavated, became loose andsank, and suddenly crushed six miners ; it also swallowed up a hut and onemother and her little boy. But this generally occurs in those mountainswhich contain venae cumulatae. Therefore, miners should leave numerousarches under the mountains which need support, or provide underpinning.Falling pieces of rock also injure their limbs, and to prevent this from hap-pening, miners should protect the shafts, tunnels, and drifts.

The venomous ant which exists in Sardinia is not found in our mines.This animal is, as Solinus 25 writes, very small and like a spider in shape ; itis called solifuga, because it shuns ( fugit ) the light ( solem ). It is very common

24 0 rcus, the god of the infernal regions,—otherwise Pluto.

2B Caius Julius Solinus was an unreliable Roman Grammarian of the 3rd Century. Thereis much difference of opinion as to the precise animal meant by solifuga. The word is variouslyspelled solipugus, solpugus, solipuga, solipunga, etc., and is mentioned by Pliny (vnr., 43),and other ancient authors all apparently meaning a venomous insect, either an ant or aspider. The term in later times indicated a scorpion.