the monasteries, institutions which were admirably suited to the times, the conservators of learning, and pioneers of art and industry all over Europe, and in whose most rigorous exactions evidences can always be traced of a judicious and enlightened concern for the general improvement of the country. Under the regime of monastic rule at Dunfermline, coals were worked in the year 1291—at Dysart, and other places along the coast, about half a century later—and, generally, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the inhabitants were assessed in coals to the churches and chapels, which, after the Reformation, have still continued to be paid in many parishes. Boëthius records that, in his time, the inhabitants of Fife and the Lothians dug “a black stone,” which, when kindled, gave out a heat sufficient to melt iron. How long will the coal-metals of the British isles last at the present, or even an increased expenditure of the fuel? So great has been the discrepancy, and so little understood the data on which to form a calculation, that the authorities variously estimate from two hundred to two thousand years. For home consumption the present rate is about THIRTY-TWO MILLIONS of tons annually. The export is about SIX MILLIONS: and yet such is the enormous mass of this combustible inclosed in one field alone, that no boundary can be fixed, even the most remote, for its exhaustion. The coal trade of Great Britain is nearly in the proportion of three to two of that of all the other nations of the world; while in superficial area her coal measures are to those of the United States only as 11,859 square miles to 133,132 square miles. What a vision of the future is hereby disclosed! If rightly employed, if the arts and progressive development of society at all keep pace with the means provided, the human race in the New World have a destiny to run, and a work of civilization to accomplish, to which the Old, in its brightest achievements, can furnish but a faint analogy. Scarcely two centuries have elapsed since coal was employed as an article of domestic use, or introduced upon the most limited scale into the manufactures; its now ascertained extent and boundless latent powers were not dreamt of or imagined even but half a century ago; and very recently the lamentation was general, that no coal-measures existed in the mighty continent of America. Who now can fancy a limit to the social movement with which that vast hemisphere is heaving all over—the advancing tide of its population spreading in every region—the forests cleared and covered with a net-work of railways, the rivers bridged from end to end with a navy of steamships—and all vivified and in motion through the agency of this long undiscovered product of the earth? Geological time rolled on, and the surface of our planet was replenished with the hidden treasure, and the man of science has no numbers to reckon the years that are past.