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Updated: May 9, 2025
The area of the coal-field is estimated at 51,000 square miles. In connection with the coal-fields of the United States, it is interesting to notice that a wide area in Texas, estimated at 3000 square miles, produces a large amount of coal annually from strata of the Liassic age.
But although on the continent not yet occupying so prominent a position in public estimation as do coal-fields in Great Britain, those of the former have one conspicuous characteristic, viz., the great thickness of some of the individual seams. In the coal-field of Midlothian the seams of coal vary from 2 feet to 5 feet in thickness.
Looking steadily up this pleasant valley from the threshold of the cottage, we can just see a fine, light film of white smoke against the blue sky. Two miles away, right down off the mountains, there is a small coal-field and a quarry of limestone.
The first diverging railway after leaving Handsworth, on the road to the north, is what, for want of a better name, is called the South Staffordshire, which connects Birmingham with Dudley, Walsall, Lichfield, and Tamworth, thus uniting the most purely agricultural with the most thoroughly manufacturing districts, and especially with that part of the great coal-field which is locally known as the "Black Country."
This is about three times the thickness contained in the South Wales coal-field, in a similar thickness of coal-measures. There are single seams up to 60 feet thick, but much of the coal is covered by more recent rocks of New Red and Cretaceous age.
As the gold on this circumference is found in coarser grains than in the streams running toward the centre, or Tete, I imagine that the real gold-field lies round about the coal-field; and, if I am right in the conjecture, then we have coal encircled by a gold-field, and abundance of wood, water, and provisions a combination not often met with in the world.
At the lakelet Chidia, we noticed the same sandstone rock, with fossil wood on it, which we have on the Zambesi, and knew to be a sure evidence of coal beneath. We mentioned this at the time to Captain Gardner, and our finding coal now seemed a verification of what we then said; the coal-field probably extends from the Zambesi to the Rovuma, if not beyond it.
The superimposed beds of coal in one coal-field may amount to a thickness of fifty or sixty feet, and therefore the coal alone, in that field, represents 500 x 50 = 25,000 years. But the actual coal is but an insignificant portion of the total deposit, which, as has been seen, may amount to between two and three miles of vertical thickness.
He would have lent him his eyes if he could have found that coal-field the sooner. The turtle crawled slowly up, its head thrust out inquiringly, inched along the margin of the map, and backed carefully down again, pausing for such running commentaries as "Dis yer's de ribber;" "Dat's de road;" "Dis de ma'sh."
The very different levels at which the separated parts of the same strata are found on the different sides of the fissure, in some faults, is truly astonishing. One of the most celebrated in England is that called the "ninety- fathom dike," in the coal-field of Newcastle.
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