THE CARBONIFEROUS AGE. 133 



"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 for 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 

 nges 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 workshop, who by 

 degrees acquired sufficient 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 primeval 

 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 return for the capital she had 

 invested in the ancient club-mosses. The eighteenth 

 century arrived, and with it James Watt. The brain 

 of that man was the spore out of which was developed 

 the steam-engine, and all the prodigious trees and 

 branches of modern industry which have grown out 

 of this. But coal is as mucl an essential condition of 



