The rivers show it is not in them. Are there any cosmical affinities in the things themselves to cause each to each, kind to kind, to take their respective places? When we are told, that we know not what is going on in the depths of ocean, and other hollow places of the earth, our answer is two-fold. For first we reply, there were depths and hollows, lakes, estuaries, and seas, during all the _intermediate succeeding_ epochs to the present age, and no true coal was produced: accumulation after accumulation of detrital alluvia followed, lapidified, and was distributed over extensive areas, and common to every region of the globe; but the real bituminous treasure has not been uniformly an accompaniment. A second answer is, that when and where vegetable matter, in any quantity, did accumulate, the result of the process was not COAL. The lignites of the tertiary deposits, and many of the oolites, have been subjected to the first and second stages only in those changes which plants undergo in their transition into the bituminous combustible. Nature in these instances, if we may use the expression, has made the effort, but the same results have not followed; the process is incomplete, and the product is only in patches. If we are reminded of the great oolitic deposit of Richmond, in Virginia, re-examined and pronounced to be so by Sir C. Lyell, some may still say non-content, that the problem is not yet solved as to the true position of the coal there. Many anomalies in geognostic arrangements occur in that vast continent: many of the intermediate series up to the chalk are absent altogether, and the sandstones, discriminating the new from the old red, are not fully determined. Lignite, in considerable quantity, exists among the tertiary deposits of the Alps, and has recently been found in the north-west provinces of India, in the vicinity of Kalibag; but all partaking of the usual qualities—wood, only partially altered by inhumation, and imperfectly adapted for domestic purposes.