More agreeable far to look through the vista of coming events, where a moral era has commenced out of which a mightier series of phenomena will emerge, the purposes of a wise Providence be illustrated in so transmuting and preserving the entombed relics of distant ages, and the glories of the latter day arise, when the desert place shall teem with a new life, and the wilderness give praise to the Creator of all. III. Universal, and shall we add, synchronous as a formation, there is a very interesting question connected with this subject, namely, IS COAL NOW FORMING? The general opinion among geologists leans to the affirmative side of the question, and that here, as in all the other cosmical arrangements going forward on the earth’s surface, time is the grand requisite. The necessary agencies are all at work, the other conditions are all admitted, and in the course of some future untold ages a new bituminous product will arise, similar in all respects to the old. The subject and the conclusions arrived at are not, however, free of many and great difficulties, to some of which we shall merely advert. Reverting to all the circumstances connected with the geographical distribution of the coal metals, we are inclined to think that the era which produced them was not only peculiar in the wide geographical distribution of its families of plants, but equally, if not more so, in its limitation of all those physical conditions which were necessary for their conversion into coal. The basins, it will be observed, in which the vegetable matter was deposited, were, as compared with the existing ocean, small and shallow; for most of the plants and trees grew within their area or their immediate neighborhood, and are still found in their erect position, uninjured by roughing or transport in their smallest veinlets and even minute fructifications.