GEOLOGY AND HISTORY. 505 



Dudley, Wednesbury, and Walsall, with Birmingham for its real 

 center. Other carboniferous deposits occur in Coalbrookdale, in the 

 crowded South "Wales district, and near Bristol. If all these are put 

 together, it will be seen that they compose almost all the great foci 

 of British life and manufactures at the present day. 



On the other hand, what are the great towns in the secondary and 

 tertiary southeastern tract ? London, the main distributing center, 

 preserved by its navigable river, and its official importance. South- 

 ampton, a convenient Indian and South American port. Plymouth 

 and Portsmouth, two government naval stations. Chatham, an arti- 

 ficial creation for purposes of war. Scarborough, Brighton, Chelten- 

 ham, Bath, and half a dozen other lounges for the moneyed classes. 

 All these ultimately depend for existence upon the wealth created 

 elsewhere. Leicester is almost the only town in purely Teutonic Eng- 

 land which now earns a good livelihood by industries unconnected 

 with the sea or with warlike preparations. Turning to the north, 

 Edinburgh survives by its traditional position as a metropolis and as 

 the center of the Scottish Church, the Scottish law, and to some extent 

 the Scottish aristocracy, as well as by its possession of a university 

 and a great cultivated society. But Edinburgh itself stands on a pri- 

 mary site. 



The specialties of the modern system are far too numerous to allow 

 even of passing exemplification. Here coal, there iron, in other places 

 lead or tin, forms the source of wealth and the determining cause of 

 human aggregation. The potteries draw men to Staffordshire ; finer 

 clays produce the ware of Worcester, Lambeth, or Dunmore. Flags 

 for paving are largely worked in North Wales. Lime from blue lias 

 keeps alive more than one small seacoast town. Even gold is mined 

 near Dolgelley in Merionethshire. Phosphate of lime is collected as 

 mineral manure. Cutler's green-stone and beds of jasper are found 

 among the Cambrian rocks. Millstones, hearthstones, and fire-clay 

 are other useful economic products. Terra-cotta is made at Wat- 

 combe, near Torquay. Epsom salts are manufactured from magnesian 

 limestone on the Tyne. Slates for roofing, plumbago, Cairngorm 

 pebbles, afford occupation in other parts to quarrymen and lapidaries. 

 Glass can only be made where flints are obtainable. Whitby derives 

 a small fortune from alum, jet, and the sale of fossils. Guernsey 

 lives largely by exporting its granite as road metal to London. Whet- 

 stones supply an industry to Whittle Hill, and slate-pencils to Shap in 

 Cumberland. But perhaps the strangest trade of all is that of the 

 gun-flints, still manufactured at Brandon and Norwich to supply the 

 savages of Africa, whither all the old flint-locks of Europe were shipped 

 on the invention of percussion caps. * The water-supply everywhere 

 depends upon geological conditions. Even our pleasure resorts and 



* I owe this, with many other facts, to Mr. H. B. Woodward's interesting " Geology of 

 England and Wales." 



