518 Heports and Proceedings — 



published results in treatises and manuals for students,' we have had some 

 of the most enthusiastic students of the natural history of the Carboni- 

 ferous strata and fossils in our own country and within our own times. 

 Their names must frequently occur in speaking of coal and its belongings. 



The text-books and manuals of geology by De la Beche, Phillips, 

 Trimmer, Lyell, Ansted, Jukes, Geikie, Prestwich, Green, Etheridge, and 

 others, are safe guides : the Memoirs of the Geological Surveys of England 

 and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and India are mines of scientific wealth as 

 regards the same matter ; our palseobotanists Lindley, Hutton, Artis, 

 Witham, Morris, Hooker, Binney, Bunbury, Dawes, Williamson, Carruthers, 

 Balfour, Kidston, etc., have given us good results; and others, not 

 specialists, have written good matter for our consideration. Abroad, 

 among our American friends, we have, or have had, several of the State 

 geologists (Emmons, Lesquereux, Rogers, Lesley, Newberry, Dana), who 

 have studied the Coal-measures with care, besides Steinhauer, Brown, and 

 others ; but no one has so earnestly and successfully given his serious 

 attention to this branch of geology and palaeontology as Sir J. W. Dawson, 

 of Montreal, not long since President of the British Association when we 

 met at Birmingham in 1886. His numerous memoirs and elaborate work 

 on ' Acadian Geology ' supply abundant facts and sound theories in 

 elucidation of the history of the Coal Period. Sir W. E. Logan, who 

 indeed by his studies in South Wales was the first to give geologists a clue 

 to the interpretation of much that was very obscure about coal, worked 

 with Sir J. W. Dawson in the jSTova-Scotian coal-field ; and so also did Sir 

 Charles Lyell, who there and elsewhere devoted much energy and acumen 

 to the elucidation of the origin and formation of coal. 



The indexes of successive volumes of the ' Geological Record ' show how 

 abundant have been papers and books on Coal, Coal-mines, Coal-fields, 

 Carboniferous fossils, and correlative studies, within the last few years, 

 abroad and at home. The subject is so extensive that we must confine 

 ourselves to the coal of South Wales. 



2. The Coal-field of South Wales, as studied hy Logan, De la Beche, 

 and others. — Had it been that the stone axe found in Monmouthshire by 

 Edward Lloyd ^ were really associated with the outcrop of the coal there, 

 and if truly belonging to the Stone age and used in hewing coal, as Pro- 

 fessor Hull's mention of it seems to imply,^ it would, indeed, have been 

 one among the few known evidences of prehistoric coal-mining, and would 

 tend to show that South Wales was among the places first made to yield 

 this useful mineral. 



At the present day South Wales and Monmouthshire yield coal in 

 greater quantity and of more value (by over a million pounds sterling a 

 year) than the coal-fields of Northumberland and Durham, or of Yorkshire 

 and Derbyshire ; and considerably more (by nearly £5,000,000) than that 

 of the Clyde Basin and associated coal-fields of Scotland. Indeed, the 

 annual value of the coal produced in South Wales with Monmouthshire 

 may be said to be about eleven millions out of the whole forty-five millions 

 sterling estimated as the value of the coal at the pit's mouth throughout 

 the United Kingdom. 



The great coal-field of South Wales has the especial credit of having 

 supplied some of the earliest and most important facts and phenomena 

 illustrative of the geological succession of the materials of the Coal- 



1 Omalius d'Halloy, Leonhard and Hoernes, Vogt, C. D'Orbigny and Gente, 

 Beudant, Credner, Lapparent, Contjean, and others. 



2 ' In a steep rock called Craig y park, and others in the Parish of Istrayd 

 Dyvodog, we observed divers veins of coal, exposed to sight as naked as the rock ; 

 and found a flint axe, somewhat like those used by the Americans ' {Fhil. Trans. 

 vol. xxviii. 1714, p 501 ; in a letter dated September 22, 1697). 



3 The Coal-fields, etc., 4th edit. p. 12. 



