THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. Tri 
the well, which is still known as the well of the coal-heugh — 
the old Scotch name for a coal-pit. Calderwood tells us, in 
his description of a violent tempest which burst out immedi- 
ately as his persecutor, James VI., breathed his last, that in 
Scotland the sea rose high upon the land, and that many 
** coal-heughs were drowned.” 
There is no science whose value can be adequately esti- 
mated by economists and utilitarians of the lower order. Its 
true quantities cannot be represented by arithmetical figures or 
monetary tables ; for its effects on mind must be as surely 
taken into account as its operations on matter, and what it has 
accomplished for the human intellect as certainly as what it 
has done for the comforts of society or the interests of com- 
merce. Who can attach a marketable value to the discov- 
eries of Newton? I need hardly refer to the often-quoted 
remark of Johnson; the beauty of the language in which it is 
couched has rendered patent to all the truth which it conveys. 
*¢ Whatever withdraws us from the power of the senses,” says 
the moralist — ‘* whatever makes the past, the distant, or the 
future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dig- 
nity of thinking beings.” And Geology, in a peculiar man- 
ner, supplies to the intellect an exercise of this ennobling 
character. But it has, also, its cash value. The time and 
money squandered in Great Britain alone in searching for 
coal in districts where the well-informed geologist could have 
at once pronounced the search hopeless, would much more 
than cover the expense at which geological research has been 
prosecuted throughout the world. There are few districts in 
Britain occupied by the secondary deposits, in which, at one 
time or another, the attempt has not been made. It has been 
the oc2asion of enormous expenditure in the south of Eng- 
land among the newer formations, where the coal, if it at all 
18 
