When it was first seen that coal had been once vegetable, the question arose--How did all these huge masses of vegetable matter get there? The Yorkshire and Derbyshire coal-fields, I hear, cover 700 or 800 square miles; the Lancashire about 200. How large the North Wales and the Scotch fields are I cannot say. But doubtless a great deal more coal than can be got at lies under the sea, especially in the north of Wales. Coal probably exists over vast sheets of England and France, buried so deeply under later rocks, that it cannot be reached by mining. As an instance, a distinguished geologist has long held that there are beds of coal under London itself, which rise, owing to a peculiar disturbance of the strata, to within 1,000 or 1,200 feet of the surface, and that we or our children may yet see coal-mines in the marshes of the Thames. And more, it is a provable fact that only a portion of the coal measures is left. A great part of Ireland must once have been covered with coal, which is now destroyed. Indeed, it is likely that the coal now known of in Europe and America is but a remnant of what has existed there in former ages, and has been eaten away by the inroads of the sea. Now whence did all that enormous mass of vegetable soil come? Off some neighbouring land, was the first and most natural answer. It was a rational one. It proceeded from the known to the unknown. It was clear that these plants had grown on land; for they were land- plants. It was clear that there must have been land close by, for between the beds of coal, as you all know, the rock is principally coarse sandstone, which could only have been laid down (as I have explained to you already) in very shallow water. It was natural, then, to suppose that these plants and trees had been swept down by rivers into the sea, as the sands and muds which buried them had been. And it was known that at the mouths of certain rivers--the Mississippi, for instance--vast rafts of dead floating trees accumulated; and that the bottoms of the rivers were often full of snags, etc.; trees which had grounded, and stuck in the mud; and why should not the coal have been formed in the same way?