This company, too, have been at great pains to turn their clays to account by copying the Italian and Lombard style of making bricks of various forms and colours; and the buildings erected with these bricks, and others, with white facings of the same material, of which the present Literary and Scientific Institute is an example, possess great architectural beauty. Still further examples of the æsthetic treatment of these admirable clays were made a short time ago by Monsieur Kremer, who modelled and prepared at the company’s Lightmoor clay works, in relief, and on a large scale, an historical subject, connected with Scottish history in the time of King James, as a facade for a house in London; also some noble groups, life size, of figures representing the four seasons, for a gentleman’s grounds and park near London. The reader may judge of the adaptability of these clays for such purposes by inspecting a group of a similar kind in front of the Institute. We exhibited ourselves in 1851 specimens of these and other coal-measure clays, with articles manufactured from them on both sides the river, and we had the satisfaction of hearing from distinguished judges, familiar with their merits, such as presidents of foreign Academics of Science, speak of them as superior to any they had ever seen. {306} [Picture: Swamp] COALBROOKDALE COALFIELD. The works of the company in the Dale, at Lightmoor, Horsehay, the Castle, and other parts of Dawley, are so intimately connected and so entirely dependent upon the mineral resources of the district, that some further notice is needed to complete this stretch. We said at the commencement that neither iron nor coal were found here, but in the quotation from the Philosophical Transactions it is stated that Mr. Ford made iron either hard or soft from ore and coal got in the dale; and it may perhaps without being considered a sketch of language be said that the opening into the Lightmoor valley, where coals were undoubtedly worked at an early period, is a northern lip or extension of the Dale itself. Indeed the whole of the rich mineral tract extending from Broseley to the extreme limits of the Lilleshall Company’s works, some seven miles in length, and terminating in a Symon Fault on the south-east of Madeley parish, about four miles in breadth, is universally known as the Coalbrookdale Coalfield; but the Dale proper is a hollow scooped out of soft Silurian shale, which shews itself at the railway station, by the viaduct, on the road to Lightmoor, and in various other places. Here two great faults or rents in the coalfield meet; one coming down from the Dunge at Broseley, and the other from the direction of Lilleshall, causing a difference of level varying from fifty to seven hundred feet. The coal-measures approach the northern extremity of the Dale on three sides, forming a fringe which rises from a few feet above the Dale to