WEEKS V. PANAMA RAILROAD COMPANY.21

inference than that the accident was necessarily due to the master's negligence. And it is our opinion that cases might arise between master and servant in which the evidence would show the servant to be virtually so much a stranger to* the matters and circumstances entering into the accident that it would be beyond all reason to apply to his cause of action any different rule of evidence from that applied to the cause of action of an actual stranger. In the case of Griffin vs. Boston & Albany R. R. Co. (148 Mass., p. 143) the court stated what seems to us the correct view. The court said:
Each case must depend on its own circumstances; and what would be sufficient proof of negligence in an action brought against a railroad company by a passenger or by a stranger, might not be so in an action brought by one of its servants. If the accident appears upon the evidence to be as consistent with the absence of negligence for which the defendant is responsible as with the existence of such negligence, the plaintiff must fail.
It should be said, however, that we have not found a well considered case in which the doctrine of res ispa loquitltr was applied in an action between master and servant when the servant himself was in control of or handling the agency which was the immediate cause of the accident. And the reason why the doctrine would not be applicable in such case is that in such case it would ordinarily be quite as consistent to infer that the accident was due to the servant's own act as to infer that it was due to the master's negligence. Moreover under the rule as we have laid it down the defendant must be in exclusive control of the thing causing the injury. The case of a plaintiff who is a :;ervant in control of the agency causing the explosion does not, therefore, come within the rule for the application of the maxim as herein stated.
If the facts and circumstances set out in the record of the case at bar be analysed it will appear that the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur does not apply, and that, therefore, no inference of negligence can be derived from such facts and circumstances and no presumption of negligence arises therefrom.
It does not appear that the explosion of the 18 holes bore, any necessary relation of any sort to the premature explosion ia the hole at which the plaintiff was working. The existence of such a relationship is itself purely inferential and founded on several assumptions. It rests on the as-sumptioa that the hole which the plaintiff was loading, or the neighborhood thereof, was unduly affected by heat and that this heat in some way

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