At the request of my friends, and from a desire to comply with the wishes of those persons who have been using for some time the original safety lamps, the steam safety lamps, and the gas light lamps, I am induced to publish these concise directions ; and if I shall have occasion to advert to some other particulars connected with the subject, I trust the reader will find an excuse for me, when I inform him, that explosions in coal mines have occupied my unremitted attention for the last eight years.

These lamps have been known to the scientific world, and to those concerned in coal mines in this district, for several years. The first printed account of them appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1813 ; since which time all of the respectable journals and periodical publications have been given most satisfactory reports of their value ; partly drawn from authenticated sources, and partly from their actual practical utility in coal mines, where fire damp abounded. For this lamp, in an improved state, I had the honour to receive, December 3, 1813, the unanimous thanks of the Society for preventing accidents in coal mines.

I had the pleasure, in October last, accompanied by J. H. H. Holmes, Esq and Mr. Patterson of the Herrington mill pit, to take the first light into a field of fire damp at the exploding point, which before that time was considered by most persons concerned in coal mines as an impossibility. This lamp has been in constant use wherever great danger was apprehended from fire damp since the above period. In a word, the originality and priority of my idea of an insulated light for coal mines, the construction of a safety lamp, and the establishment of the safety and utility of that lamp in coal mines greatly infested with fire damp, are now universally acknowledged.

It was for a modification of this original safety lamp that the Society of Arts, with their usual munificence, voted to me a medal in May last, which was the more gratifying, as in 1813 the original lamp had been presented by me to the Royal Society.