The coal metals shared in the general elevation of the hills, where they are either folded round their bases, or are depending, drapery-wise, from their tops. Thus the members of the inferior carboniferous series are raised about eleven hundred feet along the Lomond ridge, encompassing the east and west cones, and training westward by Binnarty and the Cleish hills. Largo and Kellie Laws have each their coal basins, of workable minerals, stretched along their eminences, and dipping toward the Teasses and Ceres basins. On the low grounds which skirt them on the south, the metals dip rapidly into the Forth, and are collected in various hollows or independent bands by the shore. The intermediate coal-fields, which occupy the center of the basin, are regulated in their strike and inclination by the dykes and outbursts of trap by which the strata have been invaded. A limestone traverses the county at right angles from north to south, emerging at Ravenscrag, which forms a line of demarkation betwixt the number of the coal seams on its opposite sides. The Lochgellic, Cowdenbeath, and Dunfermline basins, on the west, average about twelve to fourteen workable coal-bands, while on the east of the limestone, the Dysart, Wemyss, Teasses, and Ceres basins run from twenty to thirty-three of various quality and thickness. The Clackmannan coal-field recovers in numerical proportion, where there are twenty-four seams of coal, from two inches to nine feet thick, and two great slips, which raise the metals successively 700 and 1230 feet, as they abut against the Ochil range. In the Elgin basin there are twenty-seven beds of coal, with a thickness of fifty-six feet. Fifeshire thus owes its diversified shape and contour, and access to all its vast mineral treasures, to the early disturbances by which it has been so thoroughly dislocated and furrowed. Every district has a section, separate and independent, of its own. The ground you tread on is, every foot of it, a cabinet of wonders—literally a necropolis, a city of the dead. Go where you will, chronicles of the olden time are before and around you, while everywhere— “and at your side Rises a mountain-rock in rugged pride, And in that rock are shapes of shells, and forms Of creatures in old worlds.”