8 History of Anthracite Coal in Nature and Art. [January, 
three immense coal-breakers and turn out annually 300,000 tons 
of.superior coal. This basin exhibits the manner in which the 
beds have been laid down and corrugated very satisfactorily. Its 
twelve feet vein is the lowest workable bed, and is known as the 
Buck Mountain seam, one of the most valuable for furnace use. 
The blocks of white quartzose conglomerate lie in wild confusion 
around, a white sandy soil prevails, and a wilderness of whortle- 
berry bushes, overtopped by sorrowing pines, are among the un- 
attractive features of the landscape. We are compelled to look 
far away for beauty, and we find it in the long green masses of 
the Buck mountain, towering in the distance in the south, and in 
the hazy Pokono, sixty miles away to the east, in the dim dis- 
tance. A pleasant walk of half a mile will bring us to a mass of 
giant rocks, from which we may look down into the wide and 
deep ravine bearing the repelling name of “ Hell Kitchen,” from 
the blasts of hot air that at times arise from its depths. From 
this pleasant outlook we may extend our gaze over and beyond 
the Butler valley, or Nescopeck, as it is also termed, to find our 
view bounded on the north by the mountains of that name which 
arrests our otherwise extended range of vision; even to the Wy- 
oming mountain, the southern border of that valley long known 
to fame, and sung by Campbell as ; 
“ Once the loveliest land of all 
That see the Atlantic wave the morn restore.” 
We will leave the scenery around us near and far, and devote 
ourselves for the remainder of this too extended paper to the un- 
romantic but deeply interesting facts of coal mining. In wan- 
dering about the wilderness we came upon great sink-holes, which 
marked the places where the underpinning had broken and per- 
mitted the superincumbent mass of rock to descend. In these 
places there appeared a mixture of broken coal and sand, indi- 
cating the outcrop of the great coal seam. At a point near our 
hotel this has been opened, and a slope and steam engines and 
coal breaker, and all the busy industries of coal mining are vig- 
orously in action. At the No. 1 slope the coal seam descends at 
an angle of about 30° until it has reached the perpendicular 
depth of 180 feet. The bed then rises nearly vertical, and ap- 
proaching the surface, sinks again at nearly the same angle to the 
depth of 240 feet, and thence lies, as it extends southward, be- 
neath and across the valley at an angle of 10°, more or less, being 
