iv.] THE COAL IN THE FIRE. 103 



To give two instances, made now notorious by the 

 writings of geologists. As lately as 1819 a single 

 earthquake shock in Cutch, at the mouth of the Indus, 

 sunk a tract of land larger than the Lake of Geneva 

 in some places to a depth of eighteen feet, and con- 

 verted it into an inland sea. The same shock raised, 

 a few miles off, a corresponding sheet of land some 

 fifty miles in length, and in some parts sixteen miles 

 broad, ten feet above the level of the alluvial plain, 

 and left it to be named by the country-people the 

 " Ullah Bund," or bank of God, to distinguish it from 

 the artificial banks in the neighbourhood. 



Again: in the valley of the Mississippi a tract 

 which is now, it would seem, in much the same state 

 as central England was while our coal-fields were 

 being laid down the earthquakes of 1811-12 caused 

 large lakes to appear suddenly in many parts of the 

 district, amid the dense forests of cypress. One of 

 these, the " Sunk Country," near New Madrid, is 

 between seventy and eighty miles in length, and 

 thirty miles in breadth, and throughout it, as late as 

 1846, "dead trees were conspicuous, some erect in 

 the water, others fallen, and strewed in dense masses 

 over the bottom, in the shallows, and near the 

 shore." I quote these words from Sir Charles Lyell's 

 "Principles of Geology" (llth edit.), vol. i. p. 453. 

 And I cannot do better than advise my readers, if 

 they wish to know more of the way in which coal was 

 formed, to read what is said in that book concerning 

 the Delta of the Mississippi, and its strata of forests 

 sunk where they grew, and in some places upraised 

 again, alternating with beds of clay and sand, vege- 

 table soil, recent sea-shells, and what not, forming, to 



