DISTRIBUTION OF FOSSIL COAL. 6Q 



u to the present it has been supposed a stranger: it would 

 *' therefore, if the demand was so much greater, be found, 

 *' I am sure, in greater quantities than at present, as miners 

 " would be induced to seek it every where." 



A greater or more common mistake is not often com- a mistake of se< 

 mitted, than this which Mr. Cook has fallen into, in sup- lious moment, 

 posing, that coals might be any where met with, if sought 

 for; an errour which has occasioned the useless expenditure 

 of hundreds and sometimes of thousands of pounds, in nu- 

 merous instances, as some in the vicinity of Boxhill in Sus- 

 sex can testify, ou recent experience. A district passing 

 from Somersetshire, through Gloucestershire, Warwick- Only coal dis- 

 shire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, York- tricts * 

 shire, and Durham ; and some local districts to the west- 

 ward and northward of this line, contain numerous and 

 valuable seams or strata of coal; but to the eastward or 

 southward of this line, no coal ever has or probably ever will 

 be found, at practicable mining depths, owing to these 

 south-eastern districts being universally covered by great 

 thickness of upper strata to any which contain coal* 9 and 

 which upper strata seem to cover many of the intervening 

 §paces in the north-western districts of Britain ; while in 

 others of these spaces, the coals and their accompanying 

 strata seem wanting, and lower strata, from beneath the 

 coal measures, lie exposed. 



The substance called a thunder-pick, the analysis of which The thunder- 

 is given by Mr. J. Acton at page 305, is not " a crystal," (as ^ notac, 7- 

 Dr. Woodward supposed) but the exuvia of an animal now 

 unknown, called a belemnite; which extraneous fossils are 

 frequently found among alluvial matter, on the surface of 

 ploughed lands, mixed with the ruins of the stratum from 

 which they have been dislodged. A stratum in the clay 

 under the Woburn sand produces belemnites in great 

 numbers throughout its whole course, so does a stratum in 

 the great Bath freestone range of hills (see Walcot's Petri- 





* Biluminated wood lodged in white clay, such as occurs at Borry 

 Tracey in Devonshire, has often been confounded by sanguine specula* 

 tors with fossil coal, to the cruel disappointment of themselves and 

 others. 



factions 



