Our Future Goal Fields. 435 



of the insect slowly dried in the sun. When sufficiently dry, it 

 is powdered, and made into a kind of cake, and in that form 

 sold and eaten. 



In ancient poetry and fable constant allusion is made to 

 the cicada. The Greeks even kept the male insect in cages for 

 the sake of its song*. 



It was " the nightingale of the nymphs." Anacreon says, 

 " the Muses loved thee, Phoebus himself loves thee, and has 

 given thee a shrill song, old age does not wear thee out, thou 

 art wise, earthborn, and musical." The following quaint 

 fable singularly alludes to the cicada : — " Tithonus, the 

 son of Laomedon, was loved by Aurora, who carried him to 

 Oelos, thence to Ethiopia, and at last to Heaven, where she 

 prevailed on the destinies to bestow on him the gift of immor- 

 tality, but forgot to add that of youth. At last Tithonus grew 

 so old that he was obliged to be rocked to sleep, like an infant, 

 when Aurora transformed him into a cicada, which retains its 

 youth by changing its skin, and in its chirping retains the 

 loquacity of old age. So also we read that Bunomus and 

 Ariston, rival musicians, were contending against one another, 

 each played the harp, and it was hard to say which was the 

 better player, when crack went a string from the harp of 

 Bunomus, a cicada pitching on the top of the instrument 

 supplied the place of the broken string, and so effectually, that 

 Bunomus was declared the victor. 



OUB FUTURE COAL FIELDS. 



BY JOHN JONES, F.G.S., 

 Secretary Dudley Geological Society. 



It is barely three years ago since Sir William Armstrong, in 

 his presidential address at the Newcastle meeting of the British 

 Association, startled the commercial community in general by 

 his allusions to the speedy exhaustion of our British coal fields, 

 and to the rapid approach of a period when our whole manu- 

 facturing activity must be paralyzed, or must depend upon 

 foreign supplies of coal. The Government surveyors and 

 other practical geologists have mapped out, with minute 

 accuracy, almost every inch of ground belonging to that part 

 of the great geological series known as the Coal Measures, and 

 the number and value of the various mineral seams peculiar to 

 each district have also been clearly ascertained. 



Under these circumstances, it seems no difficult problem 

 to determine the utmost limit of our resources of coal and 



