as this body of coal land seems some of the other States exceed it, though none of them have any thing like the number of distinct coal veins or aggregate thickness of coal. It is estimated that we have in all the States of the Union upward of 150,000 square miles of coal; but Pennsylvania is the only State which affords all the different varieties, as red, gray, and white ash anthracite, and semi-bituminous, bituminous, and cannel coal. Our anthracite fields are the great depositories of that description of fossil fuel on the globe, and as they are nowhere surpassed in quality, quantity, or accessibility of the coal, they must ultimately be looked to for the supplies of a large portion of the civilized world.

But what is coal? Our disquisition would most likely be thought incomplete were this question left unanswered. A chemist defines it to be "the result of the decomposition of the compound of bodies from which it is obtained. It consists for the greatest part of the earthy principle of these compound bodies, with which a part of the saline principle and some of the phlogiston of the decomposed oil are fixed and intimately combined. Coal can never be formed but by the heat of a body which has been in an oily state; hence it can not be formed by sulphur, phosphorus, metal, nor by any other substance the phlogiston of which is not in an oily state. Every oily matter, treated with fire in close vessels, furnishes true coal, so that whenever a charry residuum is left, we may be certain that the substance employed contains oil. But the inflammable principle of coal, although it proceeds from oil, certainly is not oil, but pure phlogiston; since coal, added to sulphuric acid, can form sulphur-to phosphoric acid, can form phosphorus-and since oil can produce none of these effects until it has been decomposed and reduced to a condition of coal." Besides, the phenomena accompanying the burning coal are different from those which happen when oily substances are burned. The flame of charcoal is not so bright as that of oil, and produces no smoke or soot.

But how was it formed? After the convulsions which terminated the primitive period the earth seems to have enjoyed a long season of repose, and it was during this time that the coal materiel was deposited. That it is of the same! age as the mountains which inclose it, is very certain from the fact that the layers are in conformable order with the stratification. That these mountains were at one period the bottoms of great seas or lakes is also very certain, since the rocks all point to a sedimentary origin, are full of marine shells, and contain strata of enormous thickness composed wholly of rounded and angular pebbles, which have undoubtedly been worn down by the attrition of water.

Previous to the elevation of the Appalachian hain of mountains, the climate was not only fan even temperature throughout the globe, but it was probably quite as warm as it now is sa chow for rid rone. The atmosphere was charged

with carbon, and while it was thus unfit for the support of animal life (except a few species of the lower type), it could hardly have been better adapted for the rapid growth and development of vegetable matter. As the estuaries of the sea received the debris of the then higher points, they ultimately filled up and became shallow, thus forming the layers now constituting the old red sandstone group. These deposits in time must have formed low bottoms, islands, or peninsulas, and when emerged from the water their soft mud afforded an excellent soil for the most luxuriant vegetation, beginning with aquatic weeds, grass, and creepers, and ending with gigantic vines and trees rearing their dense foliage hundreds of feet in the air. The trees consisted, for the most part, of arborescent ferns, and several hundred specimens have been identified in the coal formation. We can readily imagine, as stretching along the margin of a primitive ocean, groups of islands or low marshy bottoms covered with the rankest and most luxuriant vegetation. Constantly drinking in the vapors of a hot and humid climate, the stupendous mass would ultimately break down by its own weight, but only to be succeeded by a fresh growth:

"The penetrating sun,

His force deep darting to the dark retreat
Of vegetation, set the steaming power
At large, to wander o'er the vernant earth
In various hues."

Upon the accumulation, in this manner, of more or less vegetable material, we must suppose that, either by the subsidence of the strata of mud beneath, or by the overflow of the sea (most likely both), it would be covered over with a layer of mud and sand, which, in turn, would again rise from the water to sustain another vegetable crop. In every coal basin there are more or less distinct seams of coal, alternating with seams of slate or mud and sand; and it is hard to believe that this mechanical operation had been repeated again and again. Yet, when we come to consider all the circumstances —the soft yielding nature of the ground, and the proximity of the sea exposing it to repeated overflow-we must adopt it as the most probable theory which our limited experience in geological science can put forward.

The question now presents itself as to how this vegetable matter was converted into coal; and it has already been partially elucidated by the chemical assay. But it appears from the researches of Liebig and others, that when wood and similar vegetable substances are baried in the earth, exposed to moisture, and partially or entirely excluded from the air, they decompose slowly, and evolve carbonic acid gas, thus parting with a portion of their original oxygen. By this means they become gradually converted into lignite, or wood-coal, which contains a larger proportion of hydrogen than wood. A continuance of decomposition changes this lignite into common bituminous coal, chiefly by the discharge of carbureted hydrogen, or the gas

upon the soft mud in which they were buried, that the faintest lines of their delicate structure can be traced. We append a few specimens of the most common forms from the collection of the Scientific Association at Pottsville.

The Almighty has thus written upon the rocks of the earth the history of his own sublime work. Every formation, in ascending order, has stamped upon it, in the silent but com

When the mountains were elevated the disturbance occasioned to the strata was very un-prehensive language of nature, the memorials equal and dissimilar. Most generally the coal occupies its original horizontal position, and retains all its bituminous and oily properties; but in the anthracite regions, and throughout the eastern slope of the Alleghanies, the measures have been very much bent, twisted, and distorted, and the disturbance thus occasioned, together with the overlying and lateral pressure, allowed the elements of the coal to escape, and thereby converted it into anthracite. The elevation of the mountains caused the waters of the sea to withdraw, at the same time that it refrigerated the atmosphere, thus preparing it for a new and higher order of animal life.

of whatever creatures or incidents may have
characterized it. And it is no less curious than
true, as betraying the design of the divine au-
thor, that every step exhibits a progressive de-
velopment-a constantly advancing movement
to a higher, a nobler, a more perfect scale of
organic life. The world, from the early primi-
tive to the close of the tertiary period, was
seemingly but undergoing preparations for the
reception of man. One after the other of our
vast and varied mineral treasures, "which sub-
ject all nature to our use and pleasure," were
deposited, and they were, without doubt, de-
signed for the future comfort and happiness of
the human family:

"Wherefore did Nature pour her bounties forth
With such a full and unwithdrawing hand?
Covering the earth with odors, fruits, and flocks-
Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable,
But all to please and sate the curious taste,
And give unbounded pleasure unto man!"

TEMPLES IN WHICH I HAVE WOR-
SHIPED.

I

As to the vegetable origin of coal, Sir Charles Lyell has remarked that the microscopic examinations instituted in England, some years ago, settled this long-disputed theory forever. "After cutting off a slice so thin that it should transmit light, it was found that in many parts of the pure and solid coal, in which geologists had no suspicion that they should be able to detect any vegetable structure, not only were the annular rings of the growth of several kinds of trees AM a free-thinker. Not one of that small beautifully distinct, but even the medullary and woe-cursed class of men whose sorrowrays; and what is still more remarkable, in ful countenances are the indices to sad souls some cases even the spiral vessels could be dis-oppressed with one fearful thought, and who, covered. But besides these proofs from observing a vegetable structure in the coal itself, there are found in the shales or slates accompanying the coal, fern leaves and branches in innumerable variety and quantity; and when we find the trunks of trees and bark converted into this same coal, no one will dispute the overwhelming evidence of its vegetable origin." Many of these fossil impressions occur in a compact aggregated mass, and are so perfectly impressed

in the vain attempt to escape the terror of that thought, call themselves free-thinkers. I am no infidel, atheist, or deist. Though I worship God-the God of Abraham and my father-I am nevertheless as free of thought as the bird is free of wing, and I worship Him in His temples every where.

It is the perfection of travel-enjoyment that freedom of worship, that needs no chapel with orientated altar, no dim light from window,

splendor, half satisfy him with the belief that | of unknown men, women, and children have man can, after all, build a house worthy the residence of the Great King. But when I sit down, as I have sometimes sat down, among the shattered fragments of columns and architraves, where the chaotic ruin of a once mighty house of worship attests the grandeur of ancient adoration, but where the breath of the Almighty, over rank grass and clustering wallflowers, laughs at the temporal decay of an edifice built for the Eternal, then the heart beats less stoutly, the soul is humbled, and the blue sky is seen to be too low an arch for His abode, whose praises sound on the chords of distant starlight.

prayed and gone, to be succeeded by praying and decaying generations. This I speak not of such old cathedrals and churches as contain, in stones and monuments of brass, the attempts of those who lie in vaults below to retain names and places in the church above, but of such places as the temples of the ancients, where the very memory of a nation has disappeared-where the races of their kings and rulers are like the myths of tradition or poetry-where name, fame, and dust are all gone forever, as we count forever here on earth, and only the vacant temple and the cold altar remain.

In Abou Simbal only, of all the temples that I know of only one instance in the history I have visited, the altar on which men sacriof the earth in which man has approached to-ficed remains, and behind the altar the statues ward the hewing out of a temple whose duration should equal the duration of the world. That was in the remote province known to us as Nubia.

It was a calm and glorious summer day when my Nile boat swung under the shattered fragments of the great mountain at Ipsamboul, better known as Abou Simbal. I have before this devoted no small space in the Magazine to a minute description of this temple of ancient worship, and my object at present is not to repeat those accounts. I desire only to illustrate my subject, by endeavoring to describe some of the emotions which I felt in this and other temples where others had worshiped before me, who were now gone to unknown dust.

For, as I have said, there are some places where I worship as a child, and those are not only such places as exhibit the weakness of human efforts adequately to praise the Creator, but especially all places in which generations

of the gods they worshiped sit in profound silence waiting the return of their worshipers.

That altar is, therefore, one of the most curious stones that is to be seen by human eyes on the face of this earth.

Fourteen hundred years before the birth of our Saviour, Remeses the Great, known to Grecian fame as Sesostris, hewed in the heart of the mountain a vast temple, and cutting down its front to the water's edge, left sitting before the entrance four giant statues of himself. Within the mountain were successive chambers. The first is that of which the reader has a view on page 470, the roof supported by eight colossal statues within, and in the third chamber beyond the altar stands. It, like all the rest-statues, gods, and walls-is of the solid rock of the mountain, and therefore is the altar at which Sesostris knelt. The gods he worshiped sit there now-the very gods there now, cold, calm, stones. What sacrifices have been