That was a sight not easily to be forgotten. But we need not have gone so far from home, at least, a few hundred years ago, to see an exactly similar one. The fens of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, before the rivers were embanked, the water pumped off, the forests felled, and the reed-beds ploughed up, were exactly in the same state. The vast deposits of peat between Cambridge and the sea, often filled with timber-trees, either fallen or upright as they grew, and often mixed with beds of sand or mud, brought down in floods, were formed in exactly the same way; and if they had remained undrained, then that slow sinking, which geologists say is going on over the whole area of the Fens, would have brought them gradually, but surely, below the sea-level, to be covered up by new forests, and converted in due time into coal. And future geologists would have found--they may find yet, if, which God forbid, England should become barbarous and the trees be thrown out of cultivation--instead of fossil Lepidodendra and Sigillariae, Calamites and ferns, fossil ashes and oaks, alders and poplars, bulrushes and reeds. Almost the only fossil fern would have been that tall and beautiful Lastraea Thelypteris, once so abundant, now all but destroyed by drainage and the plough. We need not, therefore, fancy any extraordinary state of things on this planet while our English coal was being formed. The climate of the northern hemisphere--Britain, at least, and Nova Scotia--was warmer than now, to judge from the abundance of ferns; and especially of tree-ferns; but not so warm, to judge from the presence of conifers (trees of the pine tribe), as the Tropics. Moreover, there must have been, it seems to me, a great scarcity of animal-life. Insects are found, beautifully preserved; a few reptiles, too, and land-shells; but very few. And where are the traces of such a swarming life as would be entombed were a tropic forest now sunk; which is found entombed in many parts of our English fens? The only explanation which I can offer is this--that the club-mosses, tree- ferns, pines, and other low-ranked vegetation of the coal afforded little or no food for animals, as the same families of plants do to this day; and if creatures can get nothing to eat, they certainly cannot multiply and replenish the earth. But, be that as it may, the fact that coal is buried forest is not affected.