TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 45 



Upper Silurian rocks, in the form of quartz-rock ; whilst the limestones and shales 

 of Dudley, and their beautiful fossils, surmounted by those of Sedgeley, are very 

 rich, and characteristic of part of the overlying Ludlow and Aymestry series. I am 

 glad to find that the members of the Dudley and Midland Geological Society will 

 not only communicate to us papers on the different organic remains of these de- 

 posits, but will also point out the relations of these rocks to others in the west, 

 where the whole Silurian system is more fully developed. We shall also, I hope, 

 have fresh illustrations of the effect of the eruptions of the basaltic and igneous 

 rocks of the Rowley Hills, and other similar bosses, upon the Pakeozoic strata 

 which they penetrate. 



Above all, the mining public and proprietors in the Midland Counties will, 

 I am certain, be well instructed by the evening lecture to be given by my friend 

 and associate Professor Jukes, who so distinguished himself, by his descriptions 

 and maps of this his native district, as justly to entitle him to be placed at the 

 head of the Geological Survey of Ireland, which for many years he has con- 

 ducted with great ability. He can, no doubt, indicate to you the extent to which 

 profitable works in coal are likely to be carried out, by sinkings through that 

 Lower Red Sandstone of the central counties which is now termed Permian, a 

 name proposed by myself in 1841, as taken from a large province in Russia, be- 

 cause I there found sandstones and limestones of the same age, extending over a 

 region much larger than France. The sinkings, which were successfully made 

 through this deposit at Christchurch by the late Earl of Dartmouth, only four miles 

 to the west of Birmingham, induced me, twenty-seven years ago, to write thus : — 

 " It is, indeed, impossible to mention this enterprise without congratulating geolo- 

 gists on the effects which their writings are now producing on the minds of practical 

 men, since it was entirely owing to inferences deduced from geological phenomena 

 that this work was commenced, whilst its success was derided by many of the miners 

 of the adjacent coal-field." 



If that enterprise has not been extensively followed, we must recollect that, to 

 sink shafts to depths of many hundred feet can in central England scarcely be pro- 

 fitable, so long as coal is found so much nearer the surface, as in the South Staf- 

 fordshire field ; yet, as that field is tending towards exhaustion, it is cheering to 

 know that extensive beds of coal will be worked in future ages under some of the red 

 lands of the Midland counties and the Magnesian Limestone of Nottinghamshire, 

 under which the great Derbyshire coal-field passes ; and hence all present estimates 

 of the duration of our coal-supply must be more or less fallacious, if such high pro- 

 babilities be left out of the estimate. At the same time it must be admitted that we 

 are consuming this staple of our national greatness at so rapidly increasing a ratio, 

 that the value of the warning voice of Sir William Armstrong at the Newcastle 

 Meeting of the Association, when he told us that, with a continued yearly increase 

 of two millions and three-quarters of tons, our coal-supply would in many tracts 

 be exhausted in little more than two centuries, is well sustained*. Now, when this 

 announcement was made, the average total annual produce, as ascertained by the 

 Mining Record Office of the Museum of Practical Geology, amounted to 86 millions 

 of tons ; but by the estimate of last year, as prepared by Mr. Robert Hunt, and to 

 which I have recently affixed my name, the produce has risen to the astounding 

 figure of 93 millions of tons. Such is our own natural industry and enterprise that 

 not more than 9^ per cent, of this enormous quantity is exported for the use of 

 foreign countries, among which France receives but 1,400,000 tons per annum. 



Passing from the consideration of these deep-seated subjects to the superficial 

 deposits of the country around Birminghain, I would advise any of my associates 

 who have not witnessed the phenomena to repair to the parishes of Trescott and 

 Trysull, and the adjacent hills to the west of "Wolverhampton, there to see a 

 quantity of blocks of granitic and other hard northern rocks, all foreign to the 

 district, which were evidently carried by icebergs floating in the sea which 

 covered this flat and undulating region in the heart of England during that 

 glacial period when Scotland was what Greenland is now — an ice-clad region, 



* Mr. Edward Hull, of the Geological Survey, in his valuable work the ' Coal-fields of 

 Great Britain,' had previously developed the resources of those fields, and had replied to 

 the oft-repeated question, " How long will our coal-fields last ?" 



