These plants assuredly once grew green upon the land; but where now is that land on which they flourished? Had it hills and valleys, rivers and lakes, such as diversify our country? Was it tenanted by sentient beings, and, if so, what were their forms? Did insects hum their way through the air, and cattle browse on the plains, and fish gambol in the rivers? Was the land shaded with forests, dark and rugged like those of Norway, or fragrant as the orange-groves of Spain? What, in fine, were its peculiar features, and how far did its scenery resemble that of any country of the present day? That old land has not entirely disappeared. Traces of it are found pretty extensively in South Wales, in Staffordshire, around Newcastle, and through central Scotland. Strange as it may seem, its forests are still standing in many places. The fishes that disported in its lakes, the insects that fluttered amid its woods, and the lizards that crawled among its herbage, are still in part preserved to us. Nay, more; we may sometimes see the sea-beaches of that ancient land pitted with rain-drops, and roughened with ripple-marks, as freshly as if the shower had fallen and the tide had flowed only yesterday. The peasants along the Bay of Naples gathered grapes from the flanks of Vesuvius for well-nigh seventeen centuries, before it was ascertained that they daily walked over the site of buried cities, with temples, theatres, and private houses still erect. It was many more centuries ere the people of Great Britain discovered that not a few of their villages and towns stood on the site of buried forests, and lakes, and seas. We have now, however, become aware of the fact, and are making good use of it. We dig into the earth and exhume these old forests to supply us with light and fuel; we quarry into the ripple-marked shores which fringed that old land, and build our houses with the hardened sand; we calcine the ferruginous mud that gathered in its swampy hollows, and extract therefrom our most faithful ally both in peace and war--metallic iron; we burn the delicate corals and shells and lily-like zoophytes which lived in the sea of that far-distant era, to enable us to smelt our iron, to build our houses, and manure our fields; in short, every year we are discovering some new and valuable material in the productions of that period, or finding out some new use which can be made of the substances already known. A more than ordinary interest, therefore, attaches to the history of the land and sea which have furnished us with so many aids to comfort as well as power; and we shall find, as we go on, that that history is a very curious one.