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Show POWER OF PROJECTILES. Recently, a crowbar was dropped down the main vertical shaft of a silver mine from the surface, and went directly through a cage at the bottom, piercing the bonnet and floor. No one was on the cage at the time, and no one was hurt, yet it is unpleasant to one making a trip into a mine to reflect that such things occur. As the bar fell something over five hundred yards, it was traveling with the rapidity and vim of a common ball when it struck the cage. A bit of gravel no larger than a filbert sings like a bullet toward the latter part of such a journey. A dog once fell into a shaft at Gold Hill, and though the shaft was but three hundred feet in depth, two men upon whom the animal landed were killed, as was also the clumsy cur that attempted to hop across the top of the shaft. A rat once fell down the Consolidated Virginia shaft in attempting to spring across a compartment, from wall plate to wall plate, and eleven hundred feet below landed on the bald head of a miner and exploded like a bomb, causing the miner to think a rock had cut open his skull and let out his brains. A grain of bird-shot dropped into the top of a shaft fifteen hundred feet in depth would probably bury itself into a plank or any piece of wood it might happen to strike at the bottom. This being the case, we repeat that it is not pleasant to think of such things as crowbars going down the shaft. |