and _inclined position_ into which the coal strata have been thrown. Had they remained in the position which they originally occupied, and been covered with the vast accumulations which have subsequently taken place, their depth would have been utterly beyond the industry of man to have reached. Hence the waters have disappeared, having accomplished the purpose for which they were, in this instance, spread over the earth, and the rocks formed beneath them have lifted up their heads; not uniformly, or in one continuous unbroken mass, but divided into small sections, and inclined in every possible direction. The wisdom of this appears from two considerations: From their inclined position, the various beds of coal are worked with greater facility than if they had been horizontal, a _level_ is produced for the drainage of the water, and the edges of the coal bent upward are brought nearer the surface. But these advantages are, every one of them, increased incalculably by the division of the coal-field into limited sections, whereby less water is allowed to accumulate than if the beds had been indefinitely extended; their lower extremities are prevented from being plunged to a depth that would be inaccessible; and their several portions arranged in a series of tables, like the steps of a stair, rising one behind another, and gradually inclining outward from the lower to the upper seams of the basin. Again, every coal-field is furnished with a system of checks, in the shape of _faults_ or _dykes_, against floodings, fire-blaze, and other accidents that occur in the operations of mining. These faults or dykes consist of clay, the detritus of the associated rocks, or of intruded whinstone, with which the fractures produced at the period of the disruption and elevation of the coal-field have been filled up, and the various sections of the metal insulated, and contracted to more workable dimensions. They present the appearance of a vertical wall, cutting the strata at right angles; and, though often occasioning much inconvenience and interruption, yet, as every experienced collier well knows, forming upon the whole his greatest safeguard, and essential every way to his operations. To all which add, as _constants_ in every coal-field, the minerals of lime and iron, gifts, both of them, of inestimable value: the former in the amelioration of the soil and construction of every social edifice; the latter ductile and plastic as wax, capable of being welded, and yet, by a slight chemical change, possessed of adamantine hardness; and the coal always there, in juxta-position, to serve as a fuel for the reduction of the limestone and ironstone into their economic properties—properties starting into agency as if by a miracle.