flowers, that a single representative of each kind would form a vast museum. Specimens which exhibit impressions of the bark, limbs, or trunks of trees, are, of course, correspondingly large and heavy, and could not easily be sketched in a small engraving, while the variety of leaves and flowers is so great, that it would be tedious to mention and describe them. [Illustration: THIN PLATES OF COAL.] With these few remarks, we proceed to notice first, some of the coal mines of Great Britain, and then some of our own country. Perhaps there is no country where coal mines are so rich, so frequent, and so successfully worked thus far, as those of Great Britain; and it is to this cause that the opulence of that country has often been chiefly ascribed. It is, in truth, the coal of her mines, that is the very life of her manufactures, and consequently of her commerce, every manufacturing town being established in the midst of a coal country. Of this striking instances are afforded by Bristol, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Sheffield, Newcastle, and Glasgow. The coals of Whitehaven and Wigan are esteemed the purest; and the cannel and peacock coals of Lancashire are so beautiful, that they are suspected by some to have constituted the _gagates_, or jet, which the ancients ascribed to Great Britain. In Somersetshire, the Mendip coal mines are distinguished by their productiveness: they occur there, as indeed in every other part, in the _low_ country, and are not to be found in the hills. The beds of coal are not horizontal, but sloping, dipping to the south-east at the rate of about twenty-two inches per fathom. Hence they would speedily sink so deep that it would not be possible to work them, were it not that they are intersected at intervals by perpendicular dikes or veins, of a different kind of mineral, on the other side of which these beds are found considerably raised up. They are seven in number, lying at regular distances beneath each other, and separated by beds of a different kind of substance, the deepest being placed more than two hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth.