THE MOUNTAIN. 89 



of the earth to do his work, finds food and sustenance for 

 the conquered dragon, for thousands of years. 



The scientific elaboration into well-fixed formulae of this 

 one member of the great geological series, was well worth 

 the effort and worthy of the ambition of a true and gifted 

 student and lover of science, whose unique and beautiful 

 Monograph on coal leaves little to be said for the present 

 on that subject.* 



A short and hurried enumeration has been made of the 

 thirteen separate formations or geological groups in the 

 ascending series, its base boiled, burned, and crystallized by 

 the long-exhausted primative central fires of the planet, 

 and its summit regally crowded by a diadem of slumbering 

 flames in endless depositories of fuel, or world-fires, heat 

 and light for a globe, still untouched and inexhaustible in a 

 buried flora, whose gorgeous forms scientifically restored, 

 would be a " midsummer night's dream" of wonders. Nep- 

 tune and Pluto are no longer fables ; they have become 

 stereotyped symbols in the language of science, recording 

 the past achievements of time. The imagination ("reason 

 using the external world") striding forward over hundreds of 

 years, her delicate instinct prophesying the inevitable, has at 

 last hailed and united with the understanding in her conquest 

 of the actual, in the stern demonstrations of the intellect. 



A glimpse at this majestic pile, whose whole thickness 

 aggregated some six or seven miles of solid rocks, is all that 

 has been or could be attempted here. But it is that por- 

 tion of the group forming the Alleghany Mountain, in its 

 transit of the State of Pennsylvania, that is the special sub- 

 ject of consideration in this place. 



The Alleghany Mountain crosses the State from northeast 

 to southwest, dividing it into two approximately equal dis- 

 tricts. The region to the southeast of the line of eleva- 

 tions called the Alleghany, with the exception of a small 



* Manual of Coal and its Topography, by J. P. Lesley, Topogra- 

 phical Geologist. Published by J. B. Lippincott & Co. 



. 8* 



