1 86 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
tury till their great-great-grandchildren, thousands of 
generations after, only lift up their tiny heads in 
marshes and on heaths, and tell us that they were big 
once upon a time. 
And indeed they . must have been magnificent in 
those olden days, when they grew ihick and tall in 
the lonely marches where plants and trees were the 
chief inhabitants. We find no traces in the clay-beds 
of the coal to lead us to suppose that men lived in 
those days, nor lions, nor tigers, nor even birds to fly 
among the trees; but these grand forests were almost 
silent, except when a huge animal something like a 
gigantic newt or frog went croaking through the 
marsh, or a kind of grasshopper chirruped on the land. 
But these forms of life were few and far between, com- 
pared to the huge trees and tangled masses of ferns 
and reeds which covered the whole ground, or were re- 
flected in the bosom of the large pools and lakes round 
about which they grew. 
And now, if you have some idea of the plants and 
trees of the coal, it is time to ask how these plants 
became buried in the earth and made pure coal, in- 
stead of decaying away and leaving behind only a 
mixture of earth and leaves? 
To answer this question, I must ask you to take 
another journey with me to Norfolk in Virginia, be- 
cause there we can see a state of things something 
like the marshes of the coal-forests. All round about 
Norfolk the land is low, flat, and marshy, and to the 
south of the town, stretching far away into North 
Carolina, is a large, desolate swamp, no less than forty 
