88 
SCIENCE. 
joyous times in camp ; the meat is disposed of first’ 
and then the younger people engage in various games* 
while the older ones gather around some aged crone, 
who excitedly recounts the hunts of her girlhood days, 
plentifully intermixing stray portions of the old sagas 
and legends with which her memory is replete. Thus 
they live from day to day, the men hunting and the 
women stretching the skins, till the season comes 
around when they must return to the coast. Happy, 
contented, vagabond race ! no thought of the morrow 
disturbs the tranquility of their minds. 
When a deer is killed any distance from camp, the 
meat is cached, with the intention of returning after it 
in winter ; but with what the wolves and foxes devour 
and what the Eskimo never can find again, very little 
is brought back. 
Many have now firearms of some pattern or other ; 
and though they will hunt for a ball that has missed 
its mark for half a day, they do not hesitate to fire at 
any useless creature that comes in their way. Those 
that have no guns use bows and arrows made from 
reindeer antlers. Sometimes the deer are driven into 
ponds, and even into the salt water, and captured in 
kyacks with harpoons. 
( Continued.') 
COAL. 
By P. W. Sheafer, M. E., Pottsville, Pa. 
I. 
Coal is monarch of the modern industrial world, 
with its wonderfully diversified interests, and their ever 
expanding development. But supreme as is this more 
than kingly power at the present time, comparatively 
brief as has been the period of its supremacy, and 
unlimited, in the popular apprehension, as are its ap- 
parent resources, yet already can we calculate its 
approximate duration and predict the end of its all- 
powerful but beneficent reign. This is especially the 
case with our limited Anthracite ; the more widely 
diffused bituminous having in reserve a much longer 
term of service — short indeed as a segment of the 
world’s history, but so long, compared with an aver- 
age human life, as to be of slight practical concern to 
the present generation. 
The territory occupied by the anthracite coal fields 
of Pennsylvania is but a diminutive spot compared 
with the area of bituminous coal in Pennsylvania 
alone, to say nothing of its vast extent in other por- 
tions of the United States, and in Great Britain, 
France and Belgium. The area of the anthracite of 
the United States is but 470 square miles, not one- 
twentieth the size of Lake Erie, while the wide-spread 
bituminous coal fields cover twice the area of our four 
great lakes : the anthracite making but an insignifi- 
cant showing on the map of the continent. But the 
comparison with the bituminous area is deceptive, un- 
less the relative thickness of the two is taken into 
consideration. If the anthracite beds were spread 
out as thinly as those of the bituminous region they 
would cover eight times their present area, or 3,780 
square miles. And, again, if the denuded spaces 
within the borders of the anthracite coal fields were 
covered with a deposit of coal as thick as we may 
justly suppose they once were, and as the remaining 
still are, the available area would be increased to 
about 2,000 square miles, or 1,280,000 acres; equal 
to a coal deposit of 92,840,960,000 tons. 
Contemplating the number and extent of the coal 
beds, a total thickness of 107 feet, distributed in fif- 
teen workable beds, interstratified with a full mile in 
thickness of rock and shale, we are lost in wonder at the 
luxuriant growth of tropical plants required to pro- 
duce this vast amount of compressed fuel, and the 
mighty processes of nature by which it was placed in 
its present position. The ingenuity of scientists is taxed 
to account for this wonderful accumulation of fuel, 
once vegetable, now mineral ; once waving in fresh 
green beauty on the surface of the earth, now buried 
under hundreds of feet of solid rock ; once growing 
in a level deposit of mud so plastic that the lightest 
leaflet dropping on its surface, left its impress ; now 
the mud hardened into slate, and the rank vegetation 
changed to hard and glittering coal, rising and falling 
in geologic hills and valleys, surpassing in number, 
depth, extent, sharpness of flexure and acuteness of 
angle, anything visible in the light of upper day. 
Some slight idea of the growth of these ancient forests 
may be gained from the computation that to form only 
one of these large beds of coal required a deposit of 
vegetable matter perhaps one hundred feet in thick- 
ness. What shall we say then to the amount of vege- 
tation stored away in the mammoth bed which ex- 
tends through all three of the anthracite coal fields, 
covering an area of 300 square miles, with an average 
thickness of twenty feet, and containing, it is esti- 
mated, 6,000,000,000 tons of coal. 
Not less wonderful and interesting than the coal 
deposits is the grand floor of conglomerate which un- 
derlies them ; a vast sheet of rock, infinitely old, com- 
posed of fragments of other rocks infinitely older, 
bound together by an almost imperceptible cement 
which holds them so firmly that gunpowder will scarcely 
separate them. Whence came this great sea of peb- 
bles, water rounded and water-borne to their present 
resting place ? We find them now as the current has 
dropped them — masses of silex as large as ten-pound 
cannon balls, and almost as round, so shapely have 
they been worn by the action of some ancient current. 
These were deposited first, and then, in regular order, 
trending to the southwest, came sizes graduated down 
to those of a pea and grains of sand. 
This more than marble floor bears few saurian foot 
prints ; scarcely an impress of bird or beast or fish, 
or sign of animal life. Nothing but a bed of almost 
pure silica; a solid foundation on which to build up 
the mass of rock and the fossil fuel that we call an- 
thracite, older than the hills and predestined for the 
use of coming man. 
The pebble-laden flood ceased, and was followed 
by placid waters and gentle currents, bringing fine mud 
and silt to cover the rocky bed. Then the waters 
drained away, or the land rose, until fit for vegetable 
life, it was covered with the mighty flora of the car- 
