234 



EECREATIVE SCIENCE. 



without fire ? "With forests gone, and no 

 knowledge of tlie mineral wealth, that supplies 

 their place, what would man have been, — 

 what would he have accomplished? By fire he 

 cooks his food, and becomes universal in the 

 geographical distribution of his race. By 

 fire he travels with almost lightning speed 

 from realm to realm ; by fire he raises into 

 action gigantic machinery, and the most 

 powerful of engines. And for the supply 



glistening gneissic lands that first presented 

 their rounded crests above the wide expanse 

 of sea, had been covered over by tens of 

 thousands of feet of Silurian sediments, the 

 slow elaborate results of ages upon ages ; 

 hundreds of feet thick in the slow rolling 

 on of time were the great Devonian conglo- 

 merates — mighty beaches of that primeval 

 age — accumulated ; the trilobites and gro- 

 velling shrimps and shell-fish of the lower 



Scenic Illustration of an Ancient Coal-furest. 



and maintenance of this fire he looks to coal, 

 — to coal, the chemical and age-elaborated 

 product of decayed and perished ferns, club- 

 mosses, equisetacea and dicotyledonous trees 

 (pines). How historic time seems dwarfed 

 almost to nothingness, as we compare the 

 length of our own age — the human — with the 

 remoteness of that of the floral era of the 

 coal fonnation. And yet time, measurable 

 time, was long, long indeed before then. The 



rocks, the uncouth fish, and stranger huge 

 crustaceans of the old red sandstone era had 

 withered out as races in the long ceaseless 

 stream of physical changes and events ; three 

 phases of terrestrial conditions had passed 

 for ever clean away ere we come to, and ten 

 phases of terrestrial conditions at least have 

 been obliterated since, that period of luxu- 

 riant vegetation. But let us go back to the 

 days of which we speak. 



