nglish beds, up to the present day. The
great coal-beds along the Rocky Mountains, for instance, are
tertiary--that is, later than the chalk. Coal is forming now, I
doubt not, in many places on the earth, and would form in many more,
if man did not interfere with the processes of wild nature, by
draining the fens, and embanking the rivers.

Let me by a few words prove this statement. They will give you,
beside, a fresh proof of Sir Charles Lyell's great geological rule--
that the best way to explain what we see in ancient rocks is to take
for granted, as long as we can do so fairly, that things were going
on then very much as they are going on now.

When it was first seen that coal had been once vegetable, the
question arose--How did all these huge masses of vegetable matter get
there? The Yorkshire and Derbyshire coal-fields, I hear, cover 700
or 800 square miles; the Lancashire about 200. How large the North
Wales and the Scotch fields are I cannot say. But doubtless a great
deal more coal than can be got at lies under the sea, especially in
the north of Wales. Coal probably exists over vast sheets of England
and France, buried so deeply under later rocks, that it cannot be
reached by mining. As an instance, a distinguished geologist has
long held that there are beds of coal under London itself, which
rise, owing to a peculiar disturbance of the strata, to within 1,000
or 1,200 feet of the surface, and that we or our children may yet see
coal-mines in the marshes of the Thames. And more, it is a provable
fact that only a portion of the coal measures is left. A great part
of Ireland must once have been covered with coal, which is now
destroyed. Indeed, it is likely that the coal now known of in Europe
and America is but a remnant of what has existed there in former
ages, and has been eaten away by the inroads of the sea.

Now whence did all that enormous mass of vegetable soil come? Off
some neighbouring land, was the first and most natural answer. It
was a rational one. It proceeded from the known to the unknown. It
was clear that these plants had grown on land; for they were land-
plants. It was clear that there must have been land close by, for
between the beds of coal, as you all know, the rock is principally
coarse sandstone, which could only have been laid down (as I have
explained to you already) in very shallow water.

It was natural, then, to suppose that thes