96 MONOGRAPH OF DURA DEN. 



surface, acquired ! The world long panted after what was 

 termed the philosopher's stone. The wonderfully transmuting 

 material has been discovered at last. There are two words, 

 containing only eleven letters, but expressive of the most 

 valuable minerals in the world — coal and diamond. No two 

 minerals are more unlike, and yet essentially the same. The 

 one is bright and dazzling : the other black and forbidding. 

 The one sparkles on the brows of queens and nobles : the other 

 is every man's comfort and a country's wealth. Coal builds 

 towns and factories everywhere around it. It has bridged the 

 ocean ; it has made a highway over the earth ; and it will 

 become the civilizer of the world. The Christian missionary 

 will hail its beacon-light in the wilderness ; the solitary place 

 will be made glad by it ; the Gospel message will speed along 

 the lines of its accelerating power. How curious the reflection, 

 that the present commercial greatness of Britain, and in which 

 all its noble i:)liilanthropic schemes are built up, should be inti- 

 mately connected Avitli a black combustible mineral, the product 

 of arboraceous ferns and gigantic reeds — vegetables of strange 

 forms and uncouth names, which flourished and decayed on the 

 surface of the earth, age after age, ere the mountains in many 

 a land were yet upheaved — and plains and mountains, which 

 then towered aloft with their dense forests, are again engulfed — 

 and when as yet there was no man to till the ground ! But 

 such truths geology teaches us, the lessons engraven as with a 

 pen of iron on the flinty rocks, and the readings as legible and 

 accurate as the print of yesterday. 



EUlNBUUGll ; T. CONSTABLK, riilNTKK TO IIEK MAJESTV 



