underlie 200,000 square miles in the United States, which have been actually probed, irrespective of the vast area to be hereafter examined. Taking, as does Dr. Hitchcock, 1100 cubic miles of coal as the measurement of that already discovered, and assuming with him that one cubic mile would supply the country for a thousand years, we are able to look forward over a period of a million of years during which this fuel would remain unexhausted.*

§ 71. Nor is the care shown in stowing away this fuel less worthy of our admiration. The masses of these soft, but gradually hardening vegetable-coal, were overlaid with strata of rock, forming a roof to the vast vaults in which they were deposited for future use. These vaults, or coal-cellars, are placed in the vicinity of the points where their contents are to be needed. The tropics know them not, and the semitropics but slightly. But in those Northern climes, whose vicissitudes most encourage labor, there, where the great factories of the world are to be placed, where its commercial depots are to spring up, and population, in its most concentrated shape, is to be collected, this fuel has been stored. And then, with a careful providence which anticipates, though on so much more splendid a scale, the forethought of the manufacturer, who, before putting his machinery to work, collects together his staples as well as his fuel, we find that iron and limestone are almost invariably placed in proximity to the coal. †

*See Hitchcock's Rel. Truth Illustrated by Science, p. 112. †The bearing of the above on the political future of the United States is strikingly exhibited in Professor Le Conte's

We may well, then, unite in applying to these great and beneficent arrangements for the comfort of man that remarkable passage in which the Saviour of men-He who, during His human life, was so comfortless among those

late lectures on coal, before the Smithsonian Institute.* "There are, within the limits of the United States, no less than four coalfields of enormous dimensions. One of these, the Apalachian coal-field, commences on the north, in Pennsylvania and Ohio, sweeping south through Western Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, extends even into Alabama. Its area is estimated at about 60,000 square miles. A second occupies the greater portion of Illinois and Indiana; in extent almost equal to the Apalachian. A third covers the greater portion of Missouri; while a fourth occupies the greater portion of Michigan. Just out of the limits of the United States, in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, there is still a fifth, occupying, according to Mr. Lyell, an area of 36,000 square miles. Besides these, there are several others of less extent. If we now compare the relative coal areas of the principal coalproducing countries, the superiority of our own will be still conspicuous. The annual production of coal in Great Britain is more than seven times that of the United States, although her coal area is so much less. It is estimated that even at this enormous rate of production the coal-fields of Great Britain will yet last for five hundred years. There is little danger, then, that ours will fail us shortly. Now, industry, as the basis of the organization of society, forms the distinguishing feature of modern civilization. Coal is the very aliment of industry. The material prosperity of any country may, therefore, be tolerably accurately estimated by the amount of coal consumed. According to this method of estimation, Great Britain is superior to all other countries in actual material civilization. But if the consumption of coal is a measure of the actual civilization of a country, the amount of coal area represents its potential civilization. How far are we

*Smith. Inst. Rep. 1857, p. 129.

whose comforts He suffered so much and worked so grandly to promote-thus speaks :

"The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled; before the hills was I brought forth; while as yet He had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When He prepared the heavens I was there: when He set a compass upon the face of the depth: when He established the clouds above: when He strengthened the fountains of the deep: when He gave to the sea His decree, that the waters should not pass His commandment: when He appointed the foundations of the earth: THERE I WAS BY HIM, AS ONE BROUGHT UP WITH HIM: AND I WAS DAILY HIS DELIGHT, REJOICING ALWAYS BEFORE HIM; REJOICING IN THE HABITABLE PART OF HIS EARTH; AND MY DELIGHTS WERE WITH THE SONS OF MEN.”

superior to all other countries in this respect! What a glorious destiny awaits us in the future,-a destiny already predetermined in the earliest geological history of the earth!"

§ 72. THERE are but two ways of accounting for the comparatively recent development of the arts and sciences: the one is, that man, though as a race, of indefinite age, has only of late years been endowed with faculties for this purpose; the other is, that the race itself is of recent creation.

Take, for instance, the first alternative. Who endowed the race with these new and special powers? Does not a new and substantive addition to the properties of mind prove an originator as much as does its original establishment?

But, in point of fact, there is no such recent accretion to the store of human intellect. It is true that Christianity has given an industrial value and beneficence to modern art, and that this has almost indefinitely increased the number of useful inventions; but is art itself developed in our own times to any greater degree than we would expect from the accumulation of the experience derived from so long a lapse of years? Compare, for instance, the elegance of the art of our own days with that of what is called ancient times, and see wherein we have gained. It is not in architecture, however it may be in house building. It is not in sculpture, however it may be in the industrial use of stone.

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It is not in the embossing and moulding of gold, however it may be in the working of iron. In the mere line of ornament it is a question whether the lost arts do not almost equal the retained arts.

§ 73. Nor can we say that the inventive faculties of the human race have diminished. Nothing has since exceeded the fertility of invention and the vividness of the grouping of the Iliad, nothing has equaled the sublime and pathetic theodicy of the Book of Job. Of Aristotle, we are told by Archbishop Whately, that his is the only human intellect which, at the same time, originated and perfected an art. Nor can we now explore the remains of Pompeii or of Nineveh, without seeing that the inventive faculty among the artists who dwelt in those ancient cities was as strong as their power of decoration was great.

But if, as is thus shown, the faculty and habit of invention are not of late introduction; if we are to presume them coeval with our race, does not this bring the creation of man down to a comparatively recent period? Could intellects as flexible as those which framed the Iliad, or ambition as remorseless and patient as that which built the Pyramids, have worked for centuries without leaving a mark? Let us see how we apply the same test to other matters of human observation. Robinson Crusoe finds one day the print of a human foot on the spot which a day before was unmarked, and he concludes that, between the first and second visits, man had been there. So in our own land, we measure the duration of the several races which possessed it by the monuments of art they left. When we find that, compared with the geological record, the history