Thickets of tall reeds rose out of the water, with stems massive as those of our forest-trees, encircled at regular distances by wreaths of pointed leaflets, and bearing on their summits club-like catkins. Far away, the distant hills lay shaggy with pine-woods, and nursed in their solitudes the springs and rivulets that worked a devious course through forest, and glen, and valley, until, united into one broad river, they crept through the rich foliage of the delta and finally passed away out to sea, bearing with them a varied burden of drift-wood, pine-trees from the hills, and stray leaves and cones from the lower grounds. How different such a scene from that now presented by the very same areas of country! These old delta lands are now our coal-fields, and have exchanged the deep stillness of primeval nature for the din and turmoil of modern mining districts. In these ancient times, not only was man uncreated, but the earth as yet lacked all the higher types of vertebrated being. None of the animals that we see around us existed then; there were no sheep, nor oxen, horses, deer, nor dogs. Neither were the quadrupeds of other lands represented; the forests nourished no lions or tigers, no wolves or bears, no opossums or kangaroos. In truth, the land must have been a very silent one, for we know as yet of no animated existence that could break the stillness, save perchance some chirping grasshopper, or droning beetle, or quivering dragon-fly. No bee hummed along on errands of industry; it is doubtful, indeed, whether honey-yielding flowers formed part of the carboniferous flora; no lark carolled blithely in the sky, nor rook croaked among the woods. All was still; and one might, perhaps, have stood on some of those tree-crested islets, and heard no sound but the rippling of the water along the reedy and sedgy banks, and the rustling of the gloomy branches overhead. To one who muses on these bygone ages it is no unimpressive situation to stand in the midst of a large coal district and mark its smoking chimneys, clanking engines, and screaming locomotives, its squalid villages and still more squalid inhabitants, and its mingled air of commercial activity, physical wretchedness, and moral degradation. It is from such a point of view that we receive the most forcible illustration of those great changes whereof every country has been the scene, and which are so tersely expressed by one who has gazed on the revelations of geology with the eye of a true poet-- "There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars, bath been The stillness of the central sea."