INTRODUCTION. 



CHAPTER I. 



Extent of the Province of Geology. 



If a stranger, landing at the extremity of England, were 

 to traverse the whole of Cornwall and the North of Devon- 

 shire ; and crossing to St. David's, should make the tour of 

 all North Wales ; and passing thence through Cumberland, 

 by the Isle of Man, to the south-western shore of Scotland 

 should proceed either through the hilly region of the Border 

 Counties, or, along the Grampians, to the German Ocean ; 

 he would conclude from such a journey of many hundred 

 miles, that Britain was a thinly peopled sterile region, whose 

 principal inhabitants were miners and mountaineers. 



Another foreigner, arriving on the coast of Devon, and 

 crossing the Midland Counties, from the mouth of the Exe, 

 to that of the Tyne, would find a continued succession of 

 fertile hills and valleys, thickly overspread with towns and 

 cities, and in many parts crowded with a manufacturing 

 population, whose industry is maintained by the coal with 

 which the strata of these districts are abundantly inter 

 spersed.* 



♦ It may seen, in any correct geological map of England, thai the follow- 

 ing important and populous towns are placed upon strata belonging to the 

 single geological formation of the new red sandstone: — Exeter, Bristol, Wor- 

 cester, Warwick, Birmingham, Lichfield, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham, 

 Derby, Stafford, Shrewsbury, Chester, Liverpool, Warrington, Manchester, 

 Preston, York, and Carlisle. The population of these nineteen towns, by tlie 

 census of 1830, exceeded a million. 



The most convenient small map to which I can refer my readers, in illufi- 

 , tration of this and other parts of the present essay, is the single sheet, re- 

 VOL. I. — 2 



