The American coal-fields, like its interminable forests, endless rivers, and everything in that vast continent, are all on the gigantic scale. The basin of the Mississippi, extending from the Rocky Mountains to the Alleghanies, forms an area equal to two-thirds of the states of Europe, almost every part of which is covered with the carboniferous limestone, supporting the coal metals and the newer palæozoic rocks. The great coal-field of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio, extends, according to Sir Charles Lyell, continuously from north-east to south-west for a distance of 207 miles, its breadth being in some places 180 miles. The basin of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, is not much inferior in dimensions to the whole of England, while another coal deposit, 170 by 100 miles, lies farther to the north, between lakes Michigan and Huron. Mr. Logan, in his report on the geology of Canada, states that the coal-measures occupy nearly the whole of New Brunswick, a great part of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton island, and the south-west district of Newfoundland. And in the most remote northern regions, along the shores of the frozen sea, and the various rivers and their tributaries which fall into it, the carboniferous rocks with their inclosed beds of coal, some of considerable thickness, are found to prevail. A single seam, of an average thickness of ten feet, occurs in Pennsylvania, in the district of Pittsburgh, covering a superficial extent of about 14,000 square miles; which shows how inexhaustible the resources, and how limitless the means, of social advancement, of progress in the arts and sciences, garnered up for the generations to come in that mighty continent. Upon the authority of Sir Charles Lyell we learn, that all the floral fossil phenomena are substantially the same as in Europe—a great preponderance of stigmariæ, ferns, lepidodendra, and calamites—some consisting of trees in an erect position, and of broken trunks, with their rootlets attached, and extending in all directions; and the same grits or sandstones, are found, as those used for building near Edinburgh and Newcastle. Of forty-eight species of fossil plants or trees, detected in the strata of Nova Scotia, thirty-seven are identical with those discovered in the British beds; and, in the United States, thirty-five out of fifty-three species are described as specifically the same with the European fossils. But the most remarkable of Sir Charles’s discoveries is that, in the prodigious thickness and singular structure of the coal-basin in Nova Scotia, there are the remains of more than ten forests which rose up successively one over the other, and which, with their interposed layers of clays and solid stone, deposited at intervals, constitute a series of beds, whose vertical thickness is 14,570 feet.