186 J.P. Lesley on the Coal-measures of Cape Breton. 
of coal. On the contrary, they are built up, like the 30 and 60 
foot coal-beds of the Anthracite region of Pennsylvania, of 
many layers separated by underminings. The peculiarity here 
is that these separations are plates of ironstone, not more t 
six inches thick, instead of being layers of fire-clay, coal-slate, 
or sandstone. The structure is certainly peculiar, and convinces 
us of the quietness of deposit and of the long-continued stability 
of the sea-level. 
But inasmuch as the 60 foot coal at Mauch Chunk, on the 
Lehigh, is identifiable with the Low Main or Mammoth bed of 
the Pottsville Basin to the west, and of the Beaver Meadow, 
Hazleton, Buck Mountain, and Wyoming Basins to the north of 
it, and through them with still smaller and separated beds fur- 
ther off in the Mahanoy and Shamokin Basins, and even with 
the bituminous basins of the Alleghany Mountains,—there can 
not be, a priori, a reasonable ground for doubt, that the 25 and 
40 foot beds of Pictou are identifiable with 5 and 6 foot beds 
cap the highest mountains of the Alleghanies in Northern Penn 
sylvania, and have been swept away over wide intervals of 
Devonian valleys between them, descend also into the depths 
beneath the beds of the lowest valleys drained by the Swatara, 
the Schuylkill, the Lehigh, and the Susquehanna North Branch, 
so I have no doubt the coal-beds, whose edges we now see 
coal of Dudley, in England, “ which, forming at that place one solid seam 
in thickness, becomes split up into nine distinct seams by the intercalation 
feet of strata over the northern are the coal-field.”. The Main 
Warwickshire area is split up, according to Mr. Howell, into jive beds by 120 
of intervening strata. The Main coal of Moira is noticed by Mr. xe am 
insta 
sete & 
