A PIECE OF COAL. 197 
generation, without seeming to do much good to any- 
thing 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, 
it was discovered that this black stone would burn, 
and from that time coal has been becoming every day 
more and more useful. Without it not only should 
we have been without warmth in our houses, or light 
in our streets when the stock of forest-wood was used 
up; but we could never have melted large quantities 
of iron-stone and extracted iron. We have proof of 
this in the county of Sussex, in England. The whole 
country is full of ironstone. Iron-foundries were at 
work there as long as there was wood enough to sup- 
ply them, but gradually the works fell into disuse, and 
the last furnace was put out in the year 1809. So 
now, because there is no coal in Sussex, the iron) 
lies idle; while in the North, where the ironstone is 
near the coal-mines, hundreds of tons are melted out 
every day. 
Again, without coal we could have had no engines 
of any kind, and consequently no large manufactories 
of cotton goods, linen goods, or cutlery. In fact, al- 
most everything we use could only have been made 
with difficulty and in small quantities; and even if we 
