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 still goes on 
In sUence round me, — the perpetual work 
Of thy creation — finished, yet renewed 
For ever." Brya-NT. 
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 Gralway, 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 IS'aturelle" 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 
tree, 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 ofi 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 Journal, 1843. 
