"The manufacturing industry of this island, colossal as is the fabric which it has raised, rests principally on no other base than our fortunate position with regard to the rocks of this series. Should our coal mines ever be exhausted, it would melt away at once, and it need not be said, that the effect produced on private and domestic comfort would be equally fatal with diminution {92} of public wealth; we should lose many of the advantages of our high civilization, and much of our cultivated grounds must be again shaded with forests, to afford fuel to a remnant of our present population. That there is a progressive tendency to approach this limit, is certain, but ages may yet pass before it is felt very sensibly; and when it does approach, the increasing difficulty and expense of working the mines of coal, will operate, by successive and gradual checks, against its consumption, through a long period, so that the transition may not be very violent; our manufactures would first feel the shock; the excess of population, supported by them, would cease to be called into existence, as the demand for their labor ceased; the cultivation of poor lands would become less profitable, and their conversion into forests more so." Where is the state in this union--I might, perhaps, safely ask, where is the country in the world, that can surpass Virginia in the variety of position and abundance of supply of this valuable combustible? She possesses, not only in common with her sister states, a liberal quantity of bituminous coal in her western and carbonaceous regions, where, according to geological calculations, bituminous coal might be reasonably expected to be found; but in the eastern division of the state, within a few miles of the tide water of a majestic stream, which empties its ample waters into the Atlantic ocean, in a geological position, where bituminous coal never would have been sought after, because bituminous coal could not there have ever been expected to have been found, bituminous coal of a good quality, and apparently in great abundance, has been found; nature seeming, as it were, in this instance, to enable her to favor an otherwise highly favored land, to have defied all her own rules, and baffled the skill of the gravest geologist, by depositing bituminous coal upon the naked and barren bosom of the uncarbonaceous granite! I have often wondered why this anomaly did not strike the capacious and highly gifted mind of Jefferson, and why he, or some other of the many reflecting men of Virginia, was not led by it to inquire, what else there might be in store for the good people of that state? By neglecting to seek for them, we ungratefully reject the proffered kindness of our Creator; the laws of inanimate matter are, in this respect, in unison with those that govern animated nature; we are furnished with the material and means, but in order to stimulate us to useful and healthful industry, we must labor in their appropriation.