Coal is very extensively developed throughout Australasia. In New South Wales, coal-measures occur in large detached portions between 29° and 35° S. latitude. The Newcastle district, at the mouth of the Hunter river, is the chief seat of the coal trade, and the seams are here found up to 30 feet thick. Coal-bearing strata are found at Bowen River, in Queensland, covering an area of 24,000 square miles, whilst important mines of Cretaceous age are worked at Ipswich, near Brisbane. In New Zealand quantities of lignite, described as a hydrous coal, are found and utilised; also an anhydrous coal which may prove to be either of Cretaceous or Jurassic age. We have thus briefly sketched the supplies of coal, so far as they are known, which are to be found in various countries. But England has of late years been concerned as to the possible failure of her home supplies in the not very distant future, and the effects which such failure would be likely to produce on the commercial prosperity of the country. Great Britain has long been the centre of the universe in the supply of the world's coal, and as a matter of fact, has been for many years raising considerably more than one half of the total amount of coal raised throughout the whole world. There is, as we have seen, an abundance of coal elsewhere, which will, in the course of time, compete with her when properly worked, but Britain seems to have early taken the lead in the production of coal, and to have become the great universal coal distributor. Those who have misgivings as to what will happen when her coal is exhausted, receive little comfort from the fact that in North America, in Prussia, in China and elsewhere, there are tremendous supplies of coal as yet untouched, although a certain sense of relief is experienced when that fact becomes generally known. If by the time of exhaustion of the home mines Britain is still dependent upon coal for fuel, which, in this age of electricity, scarcely seems probable, her trade and commerce will feel with tremendous effect the blow which her prestige will experience when the first vessel, laden with foreign coal, weighs anchor in a British harbour. In the great coal lock-out of 1893, when, for the greater part of sixteen weeks scarcely a ton of coal reached the surface in some of her principal coal-fields, it was rumoured, falsely as it appeared, that a collier from America had indeed reached those shores, and the importance which attached to the supposed event was shown by the anxious references to it in the public press, where the truth or otherwise of the alarm was actively discussed. Should such a thing at any time actually come to pass, it will indeed be a retribution to those who have for years been squandering their inheritance in many a wasteful manner of coal-consumption.