94 THE MICROSCOPE. 



matter ; and what it has accomplished for the 

 human intellect as certainly as what it has 

 done for the comforts of society, or the interests 

 of commerce. Geology, in a peculiar manner, 

 supplies to the intellect an exercise of this en- 

 nobling character. But it has also its cash 

 value. The time and money squandered in 

 Great Britain alone, in searching for coal in 

 districts where the well-informed geologist could 

 have at once pronounced the search fruitless, 

 would much more than cover the expense at 

 which geological research has been prosecuted 

 throughout the world." 1 From the peculiar 

 circumstances connected with the case to which 

 reference is now about to be made, geology 

 could not determine whether coal was likely 

 to be found or not ; but the Microscope, when 

 appealed to, gave a certain answer. 



(2.) Sir Koderick Murchison states, that ma- 

 nifestly " the place of the great upper coal- 

 fields of England is unoccupied by any clue re- 

 presentative in the Kussian empire." 2 But not 

 so, once thought the palaeontologists of Eussia. 



1 Miller's Old Red Sandstone, pp. 227, 228. 



2 Siluria, p. 334. 



