386 Notices respecting Nevo Books, 



sufficient for the whole trade. At the present day there are several 

 thousand ships constantly engaged in the transportation of that 

 combustible," In 1845 upwards of thirty-four millions of tons of coal 

 were produced in Great Britain (p. 259) ; and in the same year 

 11,987 ships' cargoes of coal were entered for duty at the port of 

 London alone. As many as 282 cargoes, — amounting to upwards of 

 80,000 tons, — have been sold in the City of London Coal-market in 

 one day (p. 263). And the iron manufacture has followed with no 

 halting steps upon this amazing increase in the production of coal. 

 It is not seventy years since William Hutton wrote his History of 

 Birmingham. He alludes to an iron furnace in the neighbourhood 

 of that town, and calculates the age of those iron-works from the 

 mound of calx or cinder which lay near the refuse of the furnace. 

 Reckoning by the ordinary rate of the increase to that mound, even 

 at the accelerated ratio of his own day, and while in constant active 

 work, he concludes that that very furnace must have been in active 

 working there for at least three thousand years, — twelve centuries 

 prior to the invasion of the Romans. And his calculation was pro- 

 bably within the m£irk instead of exceeding it*. But, within the 

 part of one century which has passed since he wrote, many and 

 many a mountain has grown up, to the disfigurement, alas ! of 

 many a fair and fertile plain, in many parts of England, any one 

 of which throws that ancient mound at Aston, the growth of more 

 than thirty centuries, altogether into the shade ; and this, although, 

 from the superior manner of working the ore, a given quantity would 

 not leave nearly so much refuse as formerly. This curious calcu- 

 lation of Hutton's would have formed a striking introduction to Mr. 

 Taylor's account of the progress of the iron manufacture. It ap- 

 pears from his work that the production of iron in that same district 

 (the StaiFordshire district) had increased from 13,210 tons in 1796, 

 fifteen years after Hutton wrote, to 500,760 tons in 1846; the total 

 produce of Great Britain in the same year being upwards of 

 2,000,000 of tons. 



Another striking picture of the progress in the production of 

 coal, with all its innumerable physical and moral consequences, may 

 be drawn entirely from our author's pages. He is speaking of the 

 anthracite beds of Pennsylvania. A quarter of a century ago, he 

 tells us, a few tons of an unknown combustible were brought to Phi- 

 ladelphia from a wild and desert tract, known by the not unapt title 

 of "the Wilderness of Saint Anthony." 



" But the miner," proceeds our author, " has entered into this 

 Wilderness of Saint Anthony, and canals have penetrated it, and 

 railroads have traversed it ; basin after basin of this combustible has 

 been discovered in it ; tract after tract has supplied productive col- 

 lieries in it; until in a single year, 1847, it had furnished the sur- 

 prising amount of 3,000,000 of tons, and 11,439 vessels cleared from 



* See, further, a very interesting paper in the last Number of this 

 Journal, by Mr. John Phillips, calling attention to the antiquity of metal 

 works in England. 



