190 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
From benzoline, again, we get a liquid called aniline, 
from which are made so many of our beautiful dyes 
mauve, magenta, and violet ; and what is still more 
curious, the bitter almonds, pear-drops, and many 
other sweets which children like so well, are actually 
flavoured by essences which come out of coal-tar. 
Thus from coal we get not only nearly all our heat 
and our light, but beautiful colours and pleasant 
flavours. We spoke just now of the plants of the coal 
as being without beautiful flowers, and yet we see that 
long, long after their death they give us lovely colours 
and tints as beautiful as any in flower-world now. 
Think, then, how much we owe to these plants 
which lived and died so long ago ! If they had 
been able to reason, perhaps they might have said 
that they did not seem of much use in the world. 
They had no pretty flowers, and there was no one to 
admire their beautiful green foliage except a few 
croaking reptiles, and little crickets and grasshoppers ; 
and they lived and died all on one spot, generation 
after generation, without seeming to do much good to 
anything or anybody. Then they were covered up 
and put out of sight, and down in the dark earth 
they were pressed all out of shape and lost their 
beauty and became only black, hard coal. There 
they lay for centuries and centuries, and thousands 
and thousands of years, and still no one seemed to 
want them. 
At last, one day, long, long after man had been 
living on the earth, and had been burning wood for 
fires, and so gradually using up the trees in the forests, 
