iv.] THE COAL IN THE FIEE. 105 



in England was poor and small. But if the sinking 

 process which was going on continued a few hundred 

 years, all that huge mass of wood and leaf would be 

 sunk beneath the swamp, and covered up in mud 

 washed down from the mountains, and sand driven in 

 from the sea ; to form a bed many feet thick, of what 

 would be first peat, then lignite, and last, it may be, 

 coal, with the stems of killed trees standing up out of 

 it into the new mud and sand-beds above it, just as 

 the Sigillarias and other stems stand up in the coal- 

 beds both of Britain and of Nova Scotia ; while over 

 it a fresh forest would grow up, to suffer the same fate 

 if the sinking process went on as that which had 

 preceded it. 



That was a sight not easily to be forgotten. But 

 we need not have gone so far from home, at least, a- 

 few hundred years ago, to see an exactly similar one. 

 The fens of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, before the 

 rivers were embanked, the water pumped off, the 

 forests felled, and the reed-beds ploughed up, were 

 exactly in the same state. The vast deposits of peat 

 between Cambridge and the sea, often filled with 

 timber-trees, either fallen or upright as they grew, 

 and often mixed with beds of sand or mud, brought 

 down in floods, were formed in exactly the same way ; 

 and if they had remained undrained, then that slow 

 sinking, which geologists say is going on over the 

 whole area of the Fens, would have brought them 

 gradually, but surely, below the sea-level, to be 

 covered up by new forests, and converted in due time 

 into coal. And future geologists would have found 

 they may find yet, if, which God forbid, England 

 should become barbarous and the trees be thrown out 



