30 TRAVELS IN 
ments, who had laboured in the collieries of England, were 
selected to make the experiment. Wynherg^ a tongue of land 
projecting from the Table Mountain, was the spot fixed on, 
and the rods were put down there through hard clay, pipe- 
clay, iron-stone, and sand-stone, in successive strata, to the 
depth of twenty-three feet. The operation of boring was then 
discontinued by the discovery of actual coal coming out, as 
miners express it, to day, along the banks of a deep rivulet 
flowing out of the Tygerberg, a hilk that terminates the 
isthmus to the eastward. The stratum of coaly matter ap- 
peared to lie nearlj' horizontal. Immediately above it were 
pipe-clay and white sand-stone ; and it rested on abed of in- 
durated clay. It ran from ten inches to two feet in thickness ; 
differed in its nature in different parts : in some places were 
dug out large ligneous blocks, in which the traces of the bark, 
knots and grain were distinctly visible ; and in the very mid- 
dle of these were imbedded pieces of iron pyrites, running 
through them in crooked veins, or lying in irregular lumps. 
Other parts of the stratum consisted of laminated coal of the 
nature of turf, such as by naturalists would be called Lithan- 
thrax, and pieces occurred that seemed to differ in nothing 
from that species known in England by the name of Bovey 
coal. The ligneous part burned with a clear flame, without 
much smell, and left a residuum of light white ashes like those 
of dried wood. The more compact earthy and stoney parts 
burned less clear, gave out a sulphureous smell, and left be- 
iiind a slaty caulk, that soon contracted on the surface a deep 
i)rown ocliraccoiis crust. The borer being put down in seve- 
ral places in hopes of meeting with the main bed of coal, the 
j^eneral result v. as as follows : 
