trilobites, now a head turned up, now the caudle portion of the shell, exhibiting the inner side and abdominal rim, — now a few detached joints. In some of the specimens, — invariably headless ones, -the body seems scarce larger than tha of a common house-fly. Here, as amid the upper deposits at Sedgley, I was struck with the general resemblance of the formation to the Carboniferous Limestone: not a few of the shells are at least generically similar; there is the same abundance of crinoideæ and festinellæ ; and in some localities nearly the same profusion of the large and the minuter corals. And though trilobites are comparatively rare in the Mountain Limestone of Britain, I have found in that of Dryden, in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, the body of at least one trilobite, which I could not distinguish from a species of frequent occurrence in the Wenlock Limestone, - the Asaphus Caudatus. I may remind the reader, in corroboration of the fact, that Buckland, in his "Bridgewater Treatise," figures two decapitated specimens of this trilobite, one of which was furnished by the Carboniferous Limestone of Northumberland, and the other by the Transition Limestone near Leominster. There obtains, however, one striking difference between the more ancient and more modern deposits: I have rarely explored richly fossiliferous beds of the Mountain Limestone, without now and then finding the scales of a fish, and now and then the impression of some land-plant washed from the shore; but in the Silurian hills of the Dudley coal-field, no trace of the vertebrata has yet been found, and no vegetable product of the land.

The sun had got far down in the west ere I quitted the deserted quarry, and took my way towards the distant town, not over, but through the hill, by a long gloomy corridor. I had been aware all day, that though apparently much alone, I had yet near neighbors: there had been an irregular succes

son of dull, half-smothered sounds, from the bowels of the earth; and at times, when in contact with the naked rock, 1 could feel, as the subterranean thunder pealed through the abyss, the solid mass trembling beneath me. The phenomena were those described by Wordsworth, as eliciting, in a scene of deep solitude, the mingled astonishment and terror of Peter Bell,"When, to confound his spiteful mirth, A murmur pent within the earth, In the dead earth, beneath the road, Sudden arose! It swept along, A muffled noise, a rumbling sound: 'Twas by a troop of miners made, Plying with gunpowder their trade,

Some twenty fathoms under ground."

I was scarce prepared, however, for excavations of such imposing extent as the one into which I found the vaulted corridor open. It forms a long gallery, extending for hundreds of yards on either hand, with an overhanging precipice bare to the hilltop leaning perilously over on the one side, and a range of supporting buttresses cut out of the living rock, and perforated with lofty archways, planting at measured distances their strong feet, on the other. Through the openings between the buttresses, long since divested, by a shaggy vegetation, of every stiff angularity borrowed from the tool of the miner,the red light of evening was streaming, in well-defined patches, on the gray rock and broken floor. Each huge buttress threw its broad bar of shadow in the same direction; and thus the gallery, through its entire extent, was barred, zebra-like, with alternate belts of sun-light and gloom,-the "ebon and ivory" of Sir Walter's famed description. The rawness of artificial excavation has long since disappeared under the slow incrustations of myriads of lichens and mosses, - for the quarrier seems to have had done with the place for centuries; and if 1

could have but got rid of the recollection that it had been scooped out by handfuls for a far different purpose than that of making a grotto, I would have deemed it one of the finest caverns I ever saw. Immediately beside where the vaulted corridor enters the gallery, there is a wide dark chasm in the. floor, furnished with a rusty chain-ladder, that gives perilous access to the lower workings of the hill. There was not light enough this evening to show half-way down; but far below, in the darkness, I could see the fiery glimmer of a torch reflected on a sheet of pitch-black water; and I afterwards learned that a branch of the Dudley and Birmingham Canal, invisible for a full mile, has been carried thus far into the bowels of the hill. I crossed over the nest-like valley scooped in the summit of the eminence, a picturesque, solitary spot, occupied by a cornfield, and feathered all around on the edges with wood; and then crossing a second deep excavation, which, like the gallery described, is solely the work of the miner, I struck over a range of green fields, pleasantly grouped in the hollow between the Wren's-Nest-hill and the Castle-hill of Dudley, and reached the town just as the sun was setting. The valleys which interpose between the three Silurian islets of the Dudley basin are also Silurian; and as they have been hollowed by the denuding agencies out of useless beds of shale and mudstone, the miner has had no motive to bore into their sides and bottom, or to cumber the surface, as in the surrounding coal-field, with the ruins of the interior; and so the valleys, with their three lovely hills, form an oasis in the waste.

CHAPTER V.

Dudley; signif.ant Marks of the Mining Town. - Kindly Scotch Landlady. Temperance Coffee-house. - Little Samuel the Teetotaller. Curious Incident. - Anecdote. The Resuscitated Spinet. Forbear ance of Little Samuel. - Dudley Museum; singularly rich in Silurian Fossils - Megalichthys Hibberti. — Fossils from Mount Lebanon; very modern compared with those of the Hill of Dudley. — Geology peculiarly fitted to revolutionize one's Ideas of Modern and Ancient. - Fossils of extreme Antiquity furnished by a Canadian Township that had no name twenty years ago. - Fossils from the Old Egyptian Desert found to be comparatively of Yesterday. - Dudley Castle and Castle-bill.— Cromwell's Mission. Castle finds a faithful Chronicler in an old Serving-maid. Her Narrative. - Caves and Fossils of the Castlehill. Extensive Excavations. Superiority of the Natural to the Artificial Cavern. Fossils of the Scottish Grauwacke. - Analogy between the Female Lobster and the Trilobite.

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THE town of Dudley has been built half on the Silurian deposit, half on the coal-field, and is flanked on the one side by pleasant fields, traversed by quiet green lanes, and on the other by ruinous coal-workings and heaps of rubbish. But as the townspeople are not "lie-wasters," we find, in at least the neighborhood of the houses, the rubbish heaps intersected with innumerable rude fences, and covered by a rank vegetation. The mechanics of the place have cultivated without levelling them, so that for acres together they present the phenomenon of a cockling sea of gardens, — a rural Bay of Biscay agitated by the ground-swell,-with rows of cabbages and beds of carrots riding on the tops of huge waves, and gooseberry and currant bushes sheltering in deep troughs and hollows. I marked, as I passed through the streets, several significant traits of the

mining town one of the signboards, bearing the figure of a brawny half-naked man, armed with a short pick, and coiled up like an Andre Ferrara broadsword in a peck basket, indicates the inn of the "Jolly Miner;" the hardware shops exhibit in their windows rows of Davy's safety lamps, and vast piles of mining tools; and the footways show their sprinkling of ruggedlooking men, attired in short jackets and trousers of undyed plaiding, sorely besmutted by the soil of an underground occupation. In some instances, the lamp still sticking in the cap, and the dazzled expression of countenance, as if the eye had not yet accommodated itself to the light, indicate the close proximity of the subterranean workings. I dropped into a respectable-looking tavern to order a chop and a glass of ale, and mark, meanwhile, whether it was such a place as I might convert into a home for a few days with any reasonable prospect of comfort. But I found it by much too favorite a resort of the miners, and that, whether they agreed or disputed, they were a noisy generation over their ale. The landlady, a kindly, portly dame, considerably turned of fifty, was a Scotchwoman, a native of Airdrie, who had long ago married an Englishman in her own country, and had now been settled in Dudley for more than thirty years. My northern accent seemed to bespeak her favor; and taking it for granted that I had come into England in quest of employment, but had not yet been successful in procuring any, she began to speak comfort to my dejection, by assuring me that our country folk in that part of the world were much respected, and rose always, if they had but char acter, into places of trust. I had borne with me, on my homely suit of russet, palpable marks of my labors at Sedgley and the Wren's Nest, and looked, I daresay, rather geological than genteel. Character and scholarship, said the landlady, drawing her inference, were just everything in that neighborhood. Most