190 
AMERICAN GEOLOGY. 
associated with "broken down magnesian rocks. The deposit 
is large, but no accurate returns of the yield of quicksilver 
have been published. The mine is being worked in a system¬ 
atic manner. 
We have no mines of tin, properly speaking. 
I have said nothing of coal. It is almost impossible to 
measure or weigh in calculation its amount. But President 
Hitchcock observes truly, that the whole amount in solid mea¬ 
sure, of the coal in the United States, equals at least 3,500,000 
square miles. 
When it is considered that our country is destined to support 
its hundreds of millions of souls, that its fleets, its mines, its 
manufactures, its locomotives and the domestic firesides must 
depend upon its mineral fuel, and when we also estimate the 
vastness of our resources in the mineral kingdom, we can not 
but see that everything necessary for prosperity has been pro¬ 
vided with the most liberal hand, and on the most gigantic 
scale; and has moreover been so distributed as to accommodate 
the many and the most distant parts of the Union. There can 
be no centralization of products and resources, so as to confer 
a preponderating influence on a few favored sections of the 
Union, in the south or in the north. But enterprise and indus¬ 
try may create any where a prosperous community by availing 
itself of those natural mineral and manufacturing resources 
which are provided throughout the land. Where these do not 
exist, agriculture comes in to supply the necessary elements of 
prosperity. Nature had no sectional favors to dispense wdien 
she grew the coal plant for nine hundred miles from north to 
south, and more than a thousand miles from east to west, ex¬ 
tending over an area of a million of square miles, and at the 
same time distributed her iron and other metals still more 
widely; to say nothing of the lands and mineral productions 
upon the Pacific slope. 
Although I have not pretended to present a statistical account 
of our mineral resources, and what is recorded in the foregoing 
paragraphs is exceedingly meagre . and unsatisfactory, still 
