The coal metals immediately present themselves on the French coast at Boulogne, more inland at Mons, and in the central district at St. Etienne, betwixt the valleys of the Loire and Rhone. This last basin is of small extent, but possesses great geological interest from its position among the primary and metamorphic rocks, and the materials of which the series is composed. The metals are inclosed in a long narrow trough, of about twenty-five miles by less than a mile at its greatest breadth. Granite, gneiss, mica-slate, underlie them throughout: instead of shales, and sandstones of the usual kind, the coals are imbedded in micaceous grit, and the detrital alluvia of the crystalline rocks. It has been described as a self contained repository, with its own furnishings and equipments all, as it were, self-originating: the vegetable matter is of native growth, the trees are still vertical, and in one part of the field present the appearance of a suddenly petrified forest; the iron, too, is native, and seems to have been actually smelted on the spot, by subterranean self-combustion. The coal, underlying one of the bands of ironstone, has undergone fusion, and been changed into coke; while sulphur and crystals of sulphate of lime have been separated in the crucible by the process of sublimation, as if to complete this scene of marvels. In the low countries, at Namur and Liege, and other places along the banks of the Meuse—in Germany, Silesia, Moravia, Poland, the Carpathian Mountains—on the banks of the Volga, the Dnieper, and the Don, the coal-measures are found to occupy tracts of greater or lesser extent. These are sometimes accompanied with the usual alternating series entire and unbroken, sometimes with the absence of one or more members. In Russia the metals are imbedded in the middle mountain limestone series in one field, while in another district they are situated in the lower part of the series, or beneath the calcareous deposit, as in the thin beds of Fifeshire. The Liege coal-basin is of a remarkably complex structure—the metals lying in small hollows of contorted strata, which are bent and twisted like a sapling—elevated into every varying position and degree of inclination—and thus, by obtaining cross or horizontal sections, you pass repeatedly over the edges of the same beds. An enterprising Scotchman has long been lessee of one of these coal-fields, out of whose iron bands he has molded cannon and ball for every nation in Europe; and whose locomotives, forged from the same strata, now ply in pleasure excursions along every railway of the Netherlands and vine-clad banks of the Rhine and Moselle.