Mounts from inferior beings up to God;
And sees, by no fallacious light or dim,
Earth made for man, and man himself for Him.”
How long coal has been known and used, we cannot certainly tell, but a writer in Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopædia states that the first mention of coal is in the pages of one Theophrastus, who was, it seems, a pupil of Aristotle. He says, “Those fossil substances that are called coals,” (Greek, ἄνθραξ) “and are broken for use, are earthy; they kindle, however, and burn like wood coals; they are found in Liguria and in the way to Olympias over the mountains, and are used by the smiths.” Cæsar, although he speaks of the metals of the British isles, does not once mention its coal; but it seems more than likely that it was both known and used by the Romans during their occupation of Britain. Horsley, in his “Britannia Romana,” says of Benwell, a village near Newcastle-on-Tyne, “There was a coalry not far from this place, which is judged by those who are best skilled in such affairs to have been wrought by the Romans; and, in digging up the foundations of one of the Roman walled cities, coal cinders very large were dug up, which glowed in the fire like other coal cinders, and were not to be known from them when taken up.”
During the time of the Saxons, we find ourselves on less doubtful ground. In a grant made to the monks of Peterborough Abbey for one night’s annual entertainment, those good old souls had, we find, “ten vessels of Welsh ale, two vessels of common ale, sixty cartloads of wood, and twelve cartloads of fossil coal,” (carbonum fossilium.)
The Danes had so much fighting on hand, that they troubled themselves neither with coal nor civilization; and we know little of our English diamond until we come to Henry the Third’s reign, when, in 1239, a charter was granted to the inhabitants of Newcastle-on-Tyne to dig coals, and we find the coal called for the first time “carbo maris,” or sea-coal, a term retained through all the succeeding centuries. About this time chimneys came into fashion. As long as people burnt wood they scarcely needed chimneys, but coal introduced chimneys, to say nothing of steamboats and railroads. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who at that time used to reside alternately at Croydon and at Lambeth, had by royal permission thirty cartloads of “sea-borne coal” annually delivered at his archiepiscopal palace, because, says the historian, “for his own private use in his own chamber he now had the convenience of chimneys.”
The smoke nuisance of that day deserves a passing notice. Smoke was then with many a grand luxury. Old Hollingshed says, “Now we have many chimneys, yet our tenderlings do complain of rheums, and catarrhs, and poses. Once we had nought but rere-doses,[[58]] and our heads did never ake. For the smoke of those days was a good hardening for the house, and a far better medicine to keep the good man and his family from the quack or the pose, with which then very few were acquainted. There are old men yet dwelling in the village where I remain, who have noted how the multitude of chimneys do increase, whereas in their young days, there was not above two or three, if so many, in some uplandish towns of the realm, and peradventure in the manor places of some great lords; but each one made his fire against a rere-dose in the hall, where he dined and dressed his meat. But when our houses were built of willow, then we had oaken men; but now that our houses are made of oak, our men are not only become willow, but a great many altogether men of straw, which is a sore alteration.”
Leaving this digression, let us try and get a bird’s-eye view of the coal-fields of the British Isles. If we commence in Devonshire, we find there the Devonian culms, or Bovey Tracey coal, lying near the surface of the ground, and of little except local use. Crossing over the Bristol Channel, we come into Pembrokeshire, to the Welsh basin, remarkable because thence we mostly get our anthracite coal. Thence we pass on to the Derbyshire coal-fields, that go with little interruption into Scotland, averaging 200 miles in length, and about 40 in width,—once mighty tropical swamps, jungles, and forests, now become chief minerals of commerce. Included in this last immense field is the great Newcastle coal district, the most celebrated of any, supplying almost all the south of England, and nearly all London, with their best coals; and the Scotch carboniferous system, celebrated for its numerous fossils, and for its general base of old red sandstone. In addition to which there is the Irish carboniferous system, occupying as much as 1,000 square miles, but of an inferior quality, and not likely to be of any great economical importance.
In the words of Professor Ansted, we add: “This account of the coal-beds gives a very imperfect notion of the quantity of vegetable matter required to form them; and, on the other hand, the rate of increase of vegetables, and the quantity annually brought down by some great rivers both of the eastern and western continents, is beyond all measure greater than is the case in our drier and colder climates. Certain kinds of trees which contributed largely to the formation of the coal, seem to have been almost entirely succulent,[[59]] and capable of being squeezed into a small compass during partial decomposition. This squeezing process must have been conducted on a grand scale, and each bed in succession was probably soon covered up by muddy and sandy accumulations, now alternating with the coal in the form of shale and gritstone. Sometimes the trunks of trees caught in the mud would be retained in a slanting or nearly vertical position, while the sands were accumulating around them; sometimes the whole would be quietly buried, and soon cease to exhibit any external marks of vegetable origin.”[[60]]
There are various kinds of coal on which we may bestow a few words. There is anthracite, or non-bituminous coal, and which, therefore, burns without flame or smoke, and is extensively used in malting; and sea-coal, which is highly bituminous, and which gives forth so much flame and smoke, that in the good old times of 1306, Parliament forbad its use in London by fine and by demolition of all furnaces in which it was burnt, because “this coal did corrupt the air with its great smoke and stink;” and cannel-coal, the etymology of which, they say, is firm the word candle, because in many parts of Lancashire the poor use it in place of oil or tallow for lights; and jet, sometimes called black amber, which in France employs about 1,200 men in one district, in making earrings, rosaries, and other ornaments; and last of all, there is wood passing into coal called lignite, found only in the Devonshire culms.