72 RAMBLING THOUGHTS IN A HANLEY MARL PIT. 



Under what circumstances did this accumulation of 

 vegetable matter take place ? I have already said we can- 

 not trace anything like it in an ordinary ramble on the sea 

 shore. You may smile if I ask you to come with me to 

 a quiet country fish-pool for a lesson on coal-making. Look, 

 however, at the bottom of a fish-pool in a dingle of coppice 

 wood, when the water has been drawn off for the purpose . 

 of clearing it out or catching the fish : you will generally 

 see a mass of black sticks and leaves, a few inches thick, 

 lying on the mud below, and if you look carefully you may 

 often, under such circumstances, see traces of successive 

 layers of black leaves, with a few inches of mud between 

 the accumulations of successive autumnal falls and winter 

 floods. In this operation of nature on a minute scale, in 

 the collection of vegetable matter in the hollow of a fish- 

 pool, you may acquire an excellent idea of how coal has 

 been deposited in large basins, such for example as that of 

 North Staffordshire. If you will not condescend to so 

 simple an illustration, perhaps you will, when travelling by 

 the railroad between Stoke and Leek, so far oblige me as 

 to put aside your newspaper or your gossip for a few 

 moments after crossing the canal at Stockton Brook, and 

 look at the sides of the railway in the cutting between that 

 place and Endon Station, and you will there see a layer of 

 prostrate trunks and branches of trees. That is a sort of 

 half-way house in the process of coal formation, when the 

 valley was filled with water it may be a lake or a river 

 flowing sluggishly through it. 



But if we travel further afield we shall find analagous 

 operations of nature on a scale sufficiently large to satisfy 

 you. The narratives of Franklin and Back, and especially 

 Richardson, in the Polar regions, inform us that the rivers 

 are there constantly transporting wood and plants, some- 



