CORRESPONDENCE WITH SCIENTIFIC MEN. 59 



FROM MR. BAKE WELL. 



HAMPSTEAD, (near London,) January 8, 1839. 



MY DEAR SIR, It gave me great pleasure to receive a 

 letter from you about three weeks since. Mr. Victor Audu- 

 bon, who will take this to you is, as you perhaps know, the 

 son of Mr. Audubon, the American Ornithologist, whose 

 descriptions and drawings have been most favorably re 

 ceived in England and Europe, by our learned societies 

 and by intelligent naturalists and patrons of science. Mr. 

 Victor Audubon is a maternal grandson of my late valued 

 relative, Mr. Wm. Bakewell, once, I believe, of New Haven. 

 I believe him to be a truly worthy and ingenious young 

 man. I have now known him for several years. In reply 

 to some of the observations in your letter, I am pleased to 

 hear of the vast accumulation of coal and iron in Maryland. 

 The United States present such extensive fields for the 

 exertion of civilized man, that imagination toils in vain to 

 delineate the vast accession of moral power and happiness 

 that a few centuries hence may present in your hemisphere. 

 You say that there are no faults in the Maryland coal 

 fields, but as faults do not make themselves known at the 

 surface, they can only be ascertained by many operations 

 which, I presume, are yet on too limited a scale, to have 

 discovered them if they exist beneath the surface. In 

 some coal-fields here you may walk over beds of coal six 

 hundred feet or more below the soil, and yet, a few steps 

 further on, upon a horizontal plane, the same beds are not 

 forty feet beneath you, and you have no indication of any 

 displacement visible above ground, as stated in jny f ninth 

 chapter. In your Ohio and Pennsylvania coal - fields, 

 intersected by rivulets and ravines, the regularity of the 

 beds, on each side of the ravine, shows that there has been 

 no fault, but merely an excavation in the strata from 

 above, as described in your Journal, and the same may 

 be the case in Maryland. Since publishing my fifth edi- 





