25 
ing valuable treasures within man’s reach, and which would other- 
wise have been lost to the world. Thus, instead of misfortunes 
and deprivations, they had been among the greatest blessings we 
enjoyed. Hurriedly as he had gone through the subject, he had 
tried to point’ out some of the relationships of coal and 
its origin, and how its present condition had been brought 
about. These ancient forests received their light and 
life from the sun, and therein was the poetry of the subject; 
. the same sun which gave light and heat in those far- 
off days was the same sun which gave life and heat now, and from 
those distant ages the sun’s lightand heat had been carried down 
to us wrapped up as it were in the fossil plant-beds, in such a 
form as to be of the greatest value. Further, the: movements of 
the earth’s crust, doubtless accompanied by earthquakes and con- 
vulsions, had so broken and shifted the strata that some of them, 
which would otherwise have remained buried miles deep, had 
been bent, dislocated, and turned edge upwards, so that now this 
' fossil fuel, so indispensable for modern civilisation, had been 
brought, at many places, within the easy reach of man. All this 
had doubtlessly been planned and carried out by the wise ordina- 
tion and all-seeing providence of the Creator, by whose perfect 
laws every atom of the earth as wellas every organic particle had 
taken its right place in this created world. 
WEDNESDAY MAY 10rz. 
STONE IMPLEMENTS, 
BY 
MR. ARTHUR GRIFFITH, M.A. 
Mr. A. F. Griffith exhibited examples of stone implements 
and drew attention to the fact that one large group, the Pale- 
oliths, have been found in various parts of the world and usually, 
if not always, in deposits which from the situation and the 
fossils they contain are considered to be of very high antiquity. 
