DR. BUCKLAND’S ADDRESS. 11 
and loss. Since the publication of his map of Mendip in 
the transactions of the Geological Society of London, the 
Government of the country and the Board of Ordnance, 
had begun to perceive the importance of knowing what the 
subterranean contents of every county were; but our 
brethren, in America, were a quarter of a century ahead 
of us in this respect. Every one of the United States had 
been geologically surveyed at the expense of the respective 
states of that enlightened republie, and the result was that 
they knew, within half a mile, what were the contents of 
the whole of their enormous continent. They knew, what 
was not known ten years ago, the fact that there was in 
North America a coal field, of excellent quality, larger 
than the whole of England—not of the English coal district 
only, but larger than the entire area of England ! America 
— which, without this large coal field, must have depended 
upon other nations for many productions of manufactures, 
with this coal field would become a great manufacturing 
and commercial country. We might not live to see the 
time, but our posterity would live to see it ; it was a time 
rapidly accelerated by the the increased demand of fuel for 
steam-engines for our manufactures, by the increasing 
application of fuel to the warming of houses, and by a thou- 
sand other applications of coal to uses which were not anti- 
cipated some years ago. There were portions of minor 
coal fields which were at this moment virtually extinct, e. 2. 
that of Kingswood, in the neighbourhood of Bristol. The 
coal field of Radstock was a small one, and would soon be 
used up ; the Forest of Dean was larger, but a large appli- 
cation would soon exhaust it, and our last hope was the 
stock in Monmouthshire and South Wales. The South 
Wales coal field would endure to the time when every par- 
ticle of coal in the neighbourhood of Birmingham and the 
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