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g32 Yuthracule Coal of Pennsylvania: 
In our domestic commercial language, the anthraciie of 
Pennsylvania is called Wilkesbarre, Susquehannah, Lehigh, 
and Schuylkill coal, and by other names, having reference to 
the principal places from which it is obtained. Although 
Pennsylvania is stored with this mineral to an unparalleled ex- 
tent, it is found also, abundantly, in Rhode Island, and more 
or less, as is said, in Massachusetts, and other parts of the 
United States. 
It is not my object, at this time, to give a precise descrip- 
tion of our anthracites: there is a considerable variety among 
them, and there are differences in their properties more or less 
conspicuous, which adapt them to different uses. 
In mineralogical books, the anthracite is usually described 
as burning with little or no flame, and it is of course inferred, 
that such varieties of coal afford. little or no inflammable gas.* 
This is substantially true of many varieties of anthracite ; 
but, in observing the combustion of that of Pennsylvania in 
the close stove, (or, more properly speaking, in the chemical 
furnace, whieh is now employed for warming houses,} 
I was, from the first, struck with the abundance and 
long continuance of the flame. 1 first observed this fact in 
the Lehigh eoal, but it is certainly not less remarkable in the 
Sehuylkill. This led me to make a few easy experiments on 
the quantities of gas afforded by several varieties of mineral 
coal. The several specimens of coal were heated, separate- 
ly, in wrought iron tubes, about one inch in the interior dia- 
meter, stopped with a welded iron plug at one end—coated 
with a fire lute of sand and clay, connected by a flexible lead 
iube, with a hydro-pneumatic cistern, and placed in a Black’s 
universal furnace, having a flue of 20 feet in height, and af- 
ferding a heat which is above that necessary to melt cast iron: 
the furnace was allowed to draw with nearly its highest pow- 
er. The Lehigh coal, that of Wilkesbarre, and the Schuy]kill 
coal, of each 876 grains, or about two ounces, were exposed 
to the heat of:the furnace in different tubes,f the result was 
as follows : 
*« The anthracite burns slowly and with difficulty, yielding little or no 
fame ;”—“ as it burns without flame, it cannot be employed in reyerbe- 
ratory furnaces.” —Cleaveland’s Mineralogy, 2d ed. vol. II. page 499 to 
502. 
The foreign systems of mineralogy give substantially the same account 
of anthracite. 
+The Lehigh andSchuylkill coal were in the furnace at the same time. 
