igg THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
could have made them it would have been impossible 
to have sent them so quickly all over the world with- 
out coal, for we could have had no railways or steam- 
ships, but must have carried all goods along canals, 
and by slow sailing vessels. We ourselves must have 
taken days to perform journeys now made in a few 
hours, and months to reach other countries across 
the sea. 
In consequence of this we should have remained a 
very poor people. Without manufactories and indus- 
tries we should have had to live chiefly by tilling the 
ground, and everyone being obliged to toil for their 
daily bread, there would have been much less time 
or opportunity for anyone to study science, or litera- 
ture, or history, or to provide themselves with com- 
forts and refinements of life. 
All this then, those plants and trees of the far-off 
ages, which seemed to lead such useless lives, have 
done and are doing for us. There are many people 
in the world who complain that life is dull, that they 
do not see the use of it, and that there seems no work 
specially for them to do. I would advise such people, 
whether they are grown up or little children, to read 
the story of the plants which form the coal. These 
saw no results during their own short existences, they 
only lived and enjoyed the bright sunshine, and did 
their work, and were content. And now thousands, 
probably millions, of years after they lived and died, 
civilization owes her progress, and we much of our 
happiness and comfort, to the sunbeams which those 
plants wove into their lives. 
They burst forth again in our fires, in our brilliant 
