High Tide 1
Explosion 6
Spontaneous Combustion 43
Heat from Sun 8
Lightning 8
Carboy of Acid bursting 2
Drying Linen 1
Shirts falling into fire 6
Lighting and Upsetting Naphtha Lamp 58
Fire from Iron Kettle 1
Sealing Letter 1
Charcoal Fire of a Suicide 1
Insanity 5
Bleaching Nuts 7
Unknown 1,323

Among the more common causes of fire (such as gas, candle, curtains
taking fire, children playing with fire, stoves, &c.), it is
remarkable how uniformly the same numbers occur under each head from
year to year. General laws obtain as much in small as in great
events. We are informed by the Post-Office authorities that about
eight persons daily drop their letters into the post without directing
them–we know that there is an unvarying percentage of
broken heads and limbs received into the hospitals–and here
we see that a regular number of houses take fire, year by year, from
the leaping out of a spark, or the dropping of a smouldering pipe of
tobacco. It may indeed be a long time before another conflagration
will arise from "a monkey upsetting a clotheshorse," but we have no
doubt such an accident will recur in its appointed cycle.