V ON THE FOEMATION OF COAL 159 



headed predecessor — or possibly ancestor — and can 

 perceive that a certain vein of thrift runs through 

 this apparent prodigahty. Nature is never in a 

 hurry, and seems to have had always before her eyes 

 the adage, " Keep a thing long enough, and you 

 will find a use for it." She has kept her beds of 

 coal many millions of years without being able to 

 find much use for them ; she has sent them down 

 beneath the sea, and the sea-beasts could make 

 nothing of them ; she has raised them up into dry 

 land, and laid the black veins bare, and still, for 

 ages and ages, there was no living thing on the 

 face of the earth that could see any sort of value 

 in them ; and it was only the other day, so to 

 speak, that she turned a new creature out of her 

 v^rorkshop, who by degrees acquired sufiicient wits 

 to make a fire, and then to discover that the black 

 rock would burn. 



I suppose that nineteen hundred years ago, 

 when Julius Caesar was good enough to deal with 

 Britain as we have dealt with New Zealand, the 

 primaeval Briton, blue with cold and woad, may 

 have known that the strange black stone, of 

 which he found lumps here and there in his 

 wanderings, would burn, and so help to warm his 

 body and cook his food. Saxon, Dane, and 

 Norman swarmed into the land. The English 

 people grew into a powerful nation, and Nature 

 still waited for a full return of the capital she 



