How long coal has been known and used, we cannot certainly tell, but a writer in Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopædia states that the first mention of coal is in the pages of one Theophrastus, who was, it seems, a pupil of Aristotle. He says, “Those fossil substances that are called coals,” (Greek, ἄνθραξ) “and are broken for use, are earthy; they kindle, however, and burn like wood coals; they are found in Liguria and in the way to Olympias over the mountains, and are used by the smiths.” Cæsar, although he speaks of the metals of the British isles, does not once mention its coal; but it seems more than likely that it was both known and used by the Romans during their occupation of Britain. Horsley, in his “Britannia Romana,” says of Benwell, a village near Newcastle-on-Tyne, “There was a coalry not far from this place, which is judged by those who are best skilled in such affairs to have been wrought by the Romans; and, in digging up the foundations of one of the Roman walled cities, coal cinders very large were dug up, which glowed in the fire like other coal cinders, and were not to be known from them when taken up.” During the time of the Saxons, we find ourselves on less doubtful ground. In a grant made to the monks of Peterborough Abbey for one night’s annual entertainment, those good old souls had, we find, “ten vessels of Welsh ale, two vessels of common ale, sixty cartloads of wood, and twelve cartloads of _fossil coal_,” (_carbonum fossilium_.) The Danes had so much fighting on hand, that they troubled themselves neither with coal nor civilization; and we know little of our English diamond until we come to Henry the Third’s reign, when, in 1239, a charter was granted to the inhabitants of Newcastle-on-Tyne to dig coals, and we find the coal called for the first time “_carbo maris_,” or sea-coal, a term retained through all the succeeding centuries. About this time chimneys came into fashion. As long as people burnt wood they scarcely needed chimneys, but coal introduced chimneys, to say nothing of steamboats and railroads. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who at that time used to reside alternately at Croydon and at Lambeth, had by royal permission thirty cartloads of “sea-borne coal” annually delivered at his archiepiscopal palace, because, says the historian, “for his own private use in his own chamber he now had the convenience of chimneys.”