236 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



acid and water, evolve again that heat and light, and use it in a 

 thousand ways beneficial to his race ; nay, essential to his very 

 civilized existence. 



" My heart is awed within me, when I think 

 Of the great miracle that sthl goes on 

 In silence round me, — the perpetual work 

 Of thy creation — finished, yet renewed 

 For ever." Bryajs t t. 



I have said little of iron, though it always accompanies, and is the 

 the very handmaid of coal. For more precious, intrinsically, are these 

 black dirty jewels to England, than her silver mines ever were to 

 Spain. " Give me," said Dr. Percy, in his opening lecture to the 

 working men, " the iron, and the coal, and the brawny arm of an 

 Englishman, and I'll soon have the gold." 



In even a short essay like this there have been not a few mistakes 

 due to me, and the printers have to answer for a few more. In p. 

 10, I said the Whitehaven coal-field — a mere strip — supplied all 

 Lancashire, omitting altogether the Manchester coal-field ! I have 

 omitted another point of some importance, viz., the claim which 

 Professor King, of Galway, urges* to have first announced for 

 England, the fact that Stigmaria was the root of Sigillaria. I have 

 looked over Prof. King's statements, and am bound to say that he 

 argues the case very ably, and that he certainly thought it was the 

 the root as early as 1842, and gave anatomical reasons for so think- 

 ing, as Prof. Brongniart had done in the " Archives de la Museum 

 d'Histoire Naturelle" three years before. Prof. King quotes him for 

 these, so that he does not claim originality on this point. 



But the fact will still remain that Mr. Binney, who had been 

 looking out in England for many years to find specimens to establish 

 his opinion, showed to many friends the trees with roots attached, in 

 the Clay Cross cutting, so far back as 1839, the same year that 

 Brongniart predicted it ; and also read a paper on the subject at the 

 British Association in 1843. An able prediction is scarcely less 

 fortunate than an actual discovery ; and in this case they were 

 simultaneous, or nearly so. 



Again, Mr. Binney, to whom, more than to any living Englishman, 

 we are indebted for what we know of our coal-measures," points out to 

 me that I have committed the usual error, in restoring the Sigillaria 

 i ree, by making the roots start horizontally from the base of the stem. 

 They do not so. The four great taproots, if they can be so-called, 

 shoot obliquely down for some distance, like the instep of a foot, 

 before they send off the horizontal bifurcating roots. The cast of the 



* See his Monograph of the Permian System in England, p. 9, footnote ; also 

 the Edinburgh New Philosophical Joiu-nal, 1S43. 



