We spoke just now of
the plants of the coal as being without beautiful flowers, and
yet we see that long, long after their death they give us lovely
colours and tints as beautiful as any in flower-world now.
Think, then, how much we owe to these plants which lived and died
so long ago! If they had been able to reason, perhaps they might
have said that they did not seem of much use in the world. They
had no pretty flowers, and there was no one to admire their
beautiful green foliage except a few croaking reptiles, and
little crickets and grasshoppers; and they lived and died all on
one spot, generation after generation, without seeming to do much
good to anything or anybody. Then they were covered up and put
out of sight, and down in the dark earth they were pressed all
out of shape and lost their beauty and became only black, hard
coal. There they lay for centuries and centuries, and thousands
and thousands of years, and still no one seemed to want them.
At last, one day, long, long after man had been living on the
earth, and had been burning wood for fires, and so gradually
using up the trees in the forests, it was discovered that this
black stone would burn, and from that time coal has been becoming
every day more and more useful.
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