THE NATIONAL, GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



423 



Photograph by Heyl & Patterson 



SLATE PICKERS AT WORK 



Moving by on an endless apron, hour after hour, the coal is looked over by the pickers, 

 whose duty it is to take out every piece of slate. It is wonderful how well trained their eyes 

 become. 



just over the brow of the mountain. 

 Here, with much switching, a train is 

 made up and you think it is starting on a 

 straight run for market. 



But that is a mistake. The train will 

 run only as far as Mauch Chunk, 27 

 miles away. Here it will go into the 

 yards, behind great accumulations of 

 other cars. There is more switching ; and 

 some time, maybe the next day, maybe 

 several days later, these cars are put into 

 other trains and started to tidewater. 

 There they go into yards again and more 

 switching takes place, with road engines 

 idle while yard engineers work. 



Why coal trains must be made up, 

 broken up, made up, and broken up again, 

 amid all the confusion and congestion of 

 crowded freight yards, instead of being 

 so made up at the point of origin, that all 

 lost motion may be dispensed with, well 

 may puzzle the uninitiated. 



Under even a headway of twelve miles 



an hour, a coal train ought to run from 

 Wilkes-Barre and Scranton to New York 

 in eleven hours; and yet cars are often- 

 times many days wending their way 

 through congested yards to their destina- 

 tion. They spend from two to ten hours 

 in yards where they spend one rolling to 

 market. 



THE CREATION OP COAI, 



Having seen the harvest in the coal 

 field, let us turn to the seed time. Millions 

 of years ago Nature stored away billions 

 of tons of coal for us, and then left us a 

 record of her processes written in a lan- 

 guage that all ages and tongues can under- 

 stand. It is a story so wonderful as al- 

 most to defy belief, and yet one so plain 

 to him who reads it as to defy unbelief. 



Under every seam of coal there is a 

 bed of clay, and in this clay may be seen 

 petrified stumps and roots with the trees 

 they supported shooting up through the 



