COAL AND ITS USES.

[Footnote: From a paper lately read before the Association of Foremen
Engineers.]

By JAMES PYKE.


The records from which geologists draw their information can scarcely be
compared to written or printed histories. There are, however, nations
of whom no written account exists, who perhaps never had any written
history, but about whom we are still able to gather from other sources
a vast amount of information. Their houses, their monuments, their
weapons, and their tools have survived, and these tell us the kind of
life, the state of civilization, and the skill of the men to whom they
belonged; from the contents of their tombs we learn what manner of men
they were physically; sometimes a sudden change in the appointments and
belongings of the folk indicates that tribes which had for a long time
inhabited a district were driven out and replaced by a new race. Thus,
then, from waifs and strays we can piece together a fairly connected
account of the events of a period long antecedent to any written
history.

The investigations of Dr. Schliemann on the supposed site of the city of
Troy furnish a good example of this method of research. He found lying,
one on the top of another, traces of the existence of five successive
communities of men, differing in customs and social development, and was
able to establish the fact that some of the cities had been destroyed by