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BOOK VI.
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215
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digging they should make for themselves not only boots of rawhide, but gloves
long enough to reach to the elbow, and they should fasten loose veils over their faces ; the dust will then neither be drawn through these into their windpipes and lungs, nor will it fly into their eyes. Not dissimilarly, among the Romans22 the makers of vermilion took precautions against breathing its fatal dust. Stagnant air, both that which remains in a shaft and that which remains
in a tunnel, produces a difficulty in breathing ; the remedies for this evil are the ventilating machines which I have explained above. There is another illness even more destructive, which soon brings death to men who work in those shafts or levels or tunnels in which the hard rock is broken by fire. Here the air is infected with poison, since large and small veins and seams in the rocks exhale some subtle poison from the minerals, which is driven out by the fire, and this poison itself is raised with the smoke not unlike pompholyx,23 which clings to the upper part of the walls in the works in which ore is smelted. If this poison cannot escape from the ground, but falls down into the pools and floats on their surface, it often causes danger, for if at any time the water is disturbed through a stone or anything else, these fumes rise again from the pools and thus overcome the men, by being drawn in with their breath ; this is even much worse if the fumes of the fire have not yet all escaped. The bodies of living creatures who are infected with this poison generally swell immediately and lose all movement and feeling, and they die without pain ; men even in the act of climbing from the shafts by the steps of ladders fall back into the shafts when the poison overtakes them, because their hands do not perform their office, and seem to them to be round and spherical, and likewise their feet. If by good fortune the injured ones escape these evils, for a little while they are pale and look like dead men. At such times, no one should descend into the mine or into the neighbouring mines, or if he is in them he should come out quickly. Prudent and skilled miners burn the piles of wood on Friday, towards evening, and " twenty towns lay in the Kingdom of Aser, not far from our Sarepta, and that there had been
" iron and copper mines there, as Moses says in another place. Inasmuch, then, as these twenty " places were mining towns, and cobelt is a metal, it appears quite likely that the mineral took " its name from the land of Cabul. History and circumstances bear out the theory that Hiram " was an excellent and experienced miner, who obtained much gold from Ophir, with which he " honoured Solomon. Therefore, the Great King wished to show his gratitude to his good " neighbour by honouring a miner with mining towns. But because the King of Tyre was " skilled in mines, he first inspected the new mines, and saw that they only produced poor " metal and much wild cobelt ore, therefore he preferred to find his gold by digging the gold " and silver in India rather than by getting it by the cobelt veins and ore. For truly, cobelt " ores are injurious, and are usually so embedded in other ore that they rob them in the " fire and consume (madtet und frisi) much lead before the silver is extracted, and when this " happens it is especially speysig. Therefore Hiram made a good reckoning as to the mines " and would not undertake ail the expense of working and smelting, and so returned Solomon " the twenty towns." MPliny (xxxni, 40). " Those employed in the works preparing vermilion, cover
" their faces with a bladder-skin, that they may not inhale the pernicious powder, yet they " can see through the skin." uPompholyx was a furnace deposit, usually mostly zinc oxide, but often containing
arsenical oxide, and to this latter quality this reference probably applies. The symptoms mentioned later in the text amply indicate arsenical poisoning, of which a sort of spherical effect on the hands is characteristic. See also note on p. 112 for discussion of " corrosive " cadmia ; farther information on pompholyx is given in Note 26, p. 394. |
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