425* A DISCOURSE

book hi. fuel sufficient to feed and maintain all its hearths and fires with sweet andwholesome billet ? This the ingenious Mr. Nourse seems to demonstrate,and I think not impofsible, whilst my Fumifugium* is long since vanishedin Jura. There is no very great store of wood about Madrid , where thewinters are sharp, and so very piercing, that there is spent no lefs thanfour millions of arrobas of charcoal, (every arroba being three quarters ofour bushel, and pays to the King a Real before it comes into the town, oris sold): It is charred of the Enzina, or Cork-tree.: besides which theytise very little fuel-wood, it being exceedingly hard, and consequentlylasting and sweet.—But to return to the law.

By the preamble of the statute of 7 Fdward VI. one may perceive (themeasures compared) how plentiful fuel was in the time of Edward IV. towhat it was in the reigns of his succefsors: This suggested a review,ofsizes, and a reformation of abuses ; in which it was enacted, that everysack of coals should contain four bushels ; every Taleshide to be four feetlong, besides the carf; and if named of one, marked one, to contain six-teen inches circumference, within a foot of the middle3 if of two marks,twenty-three inches3 of three, twenty-eight 3 of four, thirty-five 3 of five,thirty-eight inches about, and so proportionably.

Billets were to be of three feet, and four inches in length : The singleio be seventeen inches and an half about3 and every billet of one cast (as

f Mr. Evelyn wrote aTrealife In 1661 , entitled Fumifugium , recommending a method toprevent the bad effects of smoke in the city of London . In that work he considers thegreat quantities of smoke, which in large towns daily ascend into the atmosphere, as likelyto produce infectious diseases.; but that opinion does not seem well founded. On the con-trary, these acid steams correct and neutralize the volatile Alkali, which in all largetowns arises in abundance from putrid substances, and which, if not corrected, would beproductive of disease, by affording a putrefactive ferment to all living bodies under theinfluence of a putrid disposition:

Did not the acid vigour of the mine,

Roll’d from so many thund’ring chimneys, tameThe putrid steams that overswam the sky;

This caustic venom would perhaps corrodeThose tender cells that draw the vital air,

In vain with all their unctuous rills bedew’d.

Armstrong.