beside which the mortal life of man is as the life of the gnat which
dances in the sun.

And all this, and more--as may be proved from the geology of foreign
countries--happened between the date of the boulder-clay, and that of
the New Red sandstone on which it rests.

IV. THE COAL IN THE FIRE

My dear town-dwelling readers, let me tell you now something of a
geological product well known, happily, to all dwellers in towns, and
of late years, thanks to railroad extension, to most dwellers in
country districts: I mean coal.

Coal, as of course you know, is commonly said to be composed of
vegetable matter, of the leaves and stems of ancient plants and
trees--a startling statement, and one which I do not wish you to take
entirely on trust. I shall therefore spend a few pages in showing
you how this fact--for fact it is--was discovered. It is a very good
example of reasoning from the known to the unknown. You will have a
right to say at first starting, "Coal is utterly different in look
from leaves and stems. The only property which they seem to have in
common is that they can both burn." True. But difference of mere
look may be only owing to a transformation, or series of
transformations. There are plenty in nature quite as great, and
greater. What can be more different in look, for instance, than a
green field of wheat and a basket of loaves at the baker's? And yet
there is, I trust, no doubt whatsoever that the bread has been once
green wheat, and that the green wheat has been transformed into
bread--making due allowance, of course, for the bone-dust, or gypsum,
or alum with which the worthy baker may have found it profitable to
adulterate his bread, in order to improve the digestion of Her
Majesty's subjects.

But you may say, "Yes, but we can see the wheat growing, flowering,
ripening, reaped, ground, kneaded, baked. We see, in the case of
bread, the processes of the transformation going on: but in the case
of coal we do not see the wood and leaves being actually transformed
into coal, or anything like it."

Now suppose we laid out the wheat on a table in a regular series,
such as you may see in many exhibitions of manufactures; beginning
with the wheat plant at one end, and ending with the loaf at the
other; and called in to look at them a savage who knew nothing of
agriculture and nothing of cookery--called in, as an extreme case,
the man in the moon, w