2 INTRODUCTION. 
hills and valleys, thickly overspread with towns 
and cities, and in many parts crowded with a 
manufacturing population, whose industry is 
maintained by the coal with which the strata of 
these districts are abundantly interspersed.* 
A third foreigner might travel from the 
coast of Dorset to the coast of Yorkshire, over 
elevated plains of oolitic limestone, or of chalk; 
without a single mountain, or mine, or coal-pit, 
or any important manufactory, and occupied by 
a population almost exclusively agricultural. 
Let us suppose these three strangers to meet at 
the termination of their journeys, and to com- 
pare their respective observations ; how ditferent 
would be the results to which each would have 
arrived, respecting the actual condition of Great 
Britain. The first would represent it as a thinly 
peopled region of barren mountains ; the se- 
cond, as a land of rich pastures, crowded with 
* It may be seen, in any correct geological map of England, 
that the following important and populous towns are placed 
upon strata belonging to the single geological formation of the 
new red sandstone : — Exeter, Bristol, Worcester, Warwick, Bir- 
mingham, Lichfield, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, 
Stafford, Shrewsbury, Chester, Liverpool, Warrington, Man- 
chester, Preston, York, and Carlisle. The population of these 
nineteen towns, by the census of 1830, exceeded a million. 
The most convenient small map to which I can refer my 
readers, in illustration of this and other parts of the present 
essay, is the single sheet, reduced by Gardner from Mr. 
Greenough's large map of England, published by the Geological 
Society of London. 
