The selection of Dover as a likely place was due to the stopping of the Channel Tunnel works by the Government, in 1886, when the tunnelling machinery was thrown idle and the employment of it in shaft-sinking for coal on the same site was suggested. Coal-seeking was thereupon begun, in spite of the already long-expressed opinion of Sir Roderick Murchison, one of our most eminent geologists, that the existence of any _productive_ coalfields in the south-eastern counties was in the highest degree improbable. The results of some thirty years’ boring and shaft-sinking at Dover seem to amply justify his view, for since March 1905, when a number of journalists were invited to inspect the works of the Consolidated Kent Collieries Corporation, little has been heard of coal at the Shakespeare Cliff shafts. On that memorable occasion the chairman of the company pointed triumphantly to a small stack of what undoubtedly was coal, and the journalists gazed, awe-stricken, upon the sight. It was not coal that would commend itself to a householder, for kitchen, or indeed any other use, being soft and easily to be crumbled between thumb and finger. The heap weighed about twelve tons, and was the sole result, to that date, from one and a half millions sterling subscribed by the public to the successive companies seeking coal here. It had thus cost £125,000 per ton; and, being so rare and costly, the chairman was very properly indignant when it was proposed to burn some. Since then; notably in 1912, other coal has been raised here and has been triumphantly exhibited in Dover shop-windows; but, up to the present, a very great deal more of that mineral has been expended upon working the machinery of the shafts than has been brought up from them.