dom rose to a sudden and short-lived splendour under Nabopolassar, and his son Nebuchadnezzar. The short reigns of their successors were comparatively inglorious, and the later Babylonian monarchy appears to have been only another instance of what we so often find in oriental history, the sudden developement of a powerful state under an able monarch, only to sink with equal rapidity under his more feeble successors. The few notices of these Babylonian kings to be found in Herodotus have been already adverted to, and it would be foreign to our present purpose to dwell upon the many interesting points in connexion with the Scriptural history which recent researches have brought to light concerning them.

We derive still less information from Herodotus concerning that later Assyrian dynasty which, as we have already seen, continued to reign at Nineveh from the first revolt of the Medes down to the destruction of the city. The siege and capture of Nineveh are noticed by him in connexion with the rise of the Median power; but he expressly reserves all details for another 'place.' In his extant work he has confined himself to the history of the Medes as the immediate precursors of the Persian power; and from the time of their revolt drops all notice of Assyria. But the mention of Sennacherib in connexion with the Egyptian history seems to prove that he was not ignorant of the existence at least of these later Assyrian monarchs, nor of their being powerful enough to carry their arms to the Egyptian frontiers, and threaten the very existence of that monarchy.

Herodotus has indeed preserved to us so few memorials of the history, either of Assyria or Babylon, that we should feel some apology to be due to our readers for having dwelt so long upon the subject, were it not for the great interest which it has of late years attracted. The same excuse may be fairly urged by Mr. Rawlinson for the great amount of space which he has devoted in his first volume to the illustration of these topics. The long appendices upon Babylonian and Assyrian history and mythology which occupy so large a portion of that volume may seem out of proportion with the place which they assume in the work of Herodotus himself. But few readers will be disposed to complain of the extension thus given to a branch of illustration which has above all others the merit of novelty; and if the chapters in question have but little connexion with the history of Herodotus, they will not the less be regarded by many as the most interesting portion of Mr. Rawlinson's work. In availing ourselves of the summary which he has presented to us of the actual results of cuneiform research, and the concluVOL. CXI. NO. CCXXV.

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sions at which its votaries have at present arrived, we do not conceal from ourselves the degree of uncertainty which still hangs about those results. It is impossible to compare the views actually put forth by Sir H. Rawlinson and the readings which he now advances with confidence with those contained in his former memoirs upon the same subject, without feeling that, as many of his earlier conclusions were based upon imperfect induction, and have had to be discarded with the progress of his knowledge, the same result may still attend many of his present views. We are very far from being disposed to share the scepticism of those who question altogether the results derived from the recent interpretations of the cuneiform inscriptions. But when we consider the peculiar difficulties which beset the inquirer into the Assyrian and Babylonian records, we cannot but regret that fuller materials for testing the soundness of the conclusions arrived at have not yet been placed at the disposal of the public. In the case of the Persian inscriptions this has been fully done, and every scholar has now the means of determining for himself the degree of confidence to which they are entitled. The result has been highly satisfactory, and the general accuracy of the translation is admitted by the learned world of Europe. But in the far more complicated and difficult case of the Assyrian inscriptions no similar publication has yet taken place; and the consequence is that while the results are admitted by many with a blind and unreasoning confidence, they are rejected by others with a hasty and sweeping scepticism. We believe both extremes to be equally unfounded. But it cannot be denied that the changes in the readings proposed by different interpreters, and even by Sir H. Rawlinson himself at different times, are such as to excite no unreasonable doubts. When we find, for instance, that the name of the king who erected the black obelisk now in the British Museum has been successively read by Sir H. Rawlinson himself as Temen-bar, Divanubara, and Shalmanubara, while Dr. Oppert now reads it as Shalmanu-sar or Shalmaneser; and that again the names now generally admitted to be those of Shalmaneser and Sennacherib were distinctly maintained by Sir H. Rawlinson in 1850 to read as Arkotsin and Bel-adonim-sha; we cannot but ask for some better evidence than we now possess that our present interpretations rest on a more secure basis than those which have preceded them.

It is true that from the peculiar mode of writing adopted in the case of proper names they are subject to much more uncertainty than the other portions of the inscriptions. Thus the names of the earlier Assyrian monarchs, and still more the

early kings of Babylon, are admitted by Sir H. Rawlinson himself to rest in many instances on little more than conjecture, or at least on very vague and imperfect inferences. But, unfortunately, it is precisely these proper names that it most concerns us to know. The fact that some unknown king, nearly three thousand years ago, carried his arms against an unknown people, swept off hundreds or thousands of them as prisoners, and compelled their prince to acknowledge his supremacy, can have but little interest for us; but if we know that the invading monarch was Sennacherib or Sardanapalus, if we can recognise in the names of those whom he assailed the well-known appellations of Hezekiah, of Jehu, or of Benhadad, the dead record seems at once to start into life and reality; and we hail the discovery as a real contribution to the history of the past.

There is perhaps nothing more striking in the general impressions derived from all that we have yet learnt from these sources than the strong similarity of the records thus preserved to us. From the earliest to the latest-from the wars of TiglathPileser in the twelfth century before the Christian era to those of Sargon and Sennacherib in the seventh, and Darius Hystaspes in the fifth, the resemblance is equally strong. The names of the tutelary deities are changed, as well as those of the nations and tribes who are attacked and subdued and the cities that are taken; but there is a constant recurrence, not only of the same forms of expression, but of exploits and events that seem to repeat themselves in a never-ending series. Something of this singular sameness may doubtless be attributed to the circumstance that the official or diplomatic style of the Persian scribes was in all probability borrowed from that of the Assyrians or Babylonians; but the real similarity lies deeper than this, and arises from the inherent uniformity of all Oriental history, a conviction that cannot fail to impress itself on the mind of every student of these, its earliest records. The wearisome monotony of that history is as unlike the annals of the fertile, active, ever-varying Greek people, as is the formal style of the official inscriptions to the lively, gossiping, and poetical narrative of Herodotus.

ART. III. — Essays on the Coal Formation and its Fossils, and a Description of the Coal Fields of North America and Great Britain, annexed to the Government Survey of the Geology of Pennsylvania. By HENRY DARWIN ROGERS, State Geologist. Edinburgh and Philadelphia: 1858. 3 vols. 4to. with Plans.

WE

E had occasion to refer in a recent Number, for another purpose, to the magnificent and elaborate work which Mr. Rogers, under the liberal patronage of the state of Pennsylvania, has recently given to the world. Our present object concerns exclusively the Essays on the Coal formations of various countries, which are by no means the least interesting and important portion of these volumes. The history of Coal affects, in the highest degree, the entire social condition. of our species; and we propose to consider it in the following pages, not so much with reference to its geological characteristics, as in connexion with the prodigious services which this mineral renders to civilisation. In those seams of combustible matter, which the industry and ingenuity of man have discovered and worked in various parts of the globe, lies the latent force which gives life to the steam-engine. Heat, motion, power, and that wonderful energy which propels in a thousand forms the mechanism of modern society, are all concentrated here; and the geological revolutions which reduced the primeval forests and morasses of the globe to this condition, were preparing, in the incalculable distance of past ages, that new element which was one day to make man the master of earth, of water, and of fire. To our mind there is nothing more indicative of the eternal forethought which framed the structure of the world, than the fact, that perishable organisations, which flourished thousands of years before the existence of man, should have become subservient to the latest applications of human skill. The power of calculation can hardly sound the stupendous addition made by this force to the dynamic power of man; but we may borrow the estimate given by Professor Rogers, of the value of the coal fields of this small island- a very small portion, as we shall presently see, of the vast coal fields which stretch across the globe.

Each acre of a coal seam, four feet in thickness, and yielding one yard net of pure coal, is equivalent to about 5000 tons, and possesses, therefore, a reserve of mechanical strength in its fuel equal to the life-labour of more than 1600 men. Each square

mile of one such single coal-bed contains 3,000,000 tons of fuel, equivalent to 1,000,000 of men labouring through twenty years of their ripe strength. Assuming, for calculation, that 10,000,000 of tons, out of the annual produce of British coal mines, are applied to the production of mechanical power, then England annually summons to her aid the equivalent of 3,300,000 fresh men pledged to exert their fullest strength through twenty years. Reducing this to one year, we find that England's actual annual expenditure of power, generated by coal, is represented by that of 66,000,000 of able-bodied labourers. This is a representation of what really exists in another form; but if we proceed so far as to convert the entire latent strength resident in the whole annual produce of our coal mines into its equivalent in human labour, then, by the same process of calculation, we shall find it to be more than the labour of 400,000,000 of strong men, or more than double the number of adult males now upon the globe!

An element in the above calculation is one of the most humiliating comparisons that can be drawn between human and mechanical power. If we estimate a lifetime of hard human work at twenty years, giving to each year 300 working days, then we have for a man's total dynamic efforts 6000 days. In coal this is represented by three tons; so that a man may stand at his own door while an ordinary quantity of coals being delivered, and say to himself: There, in that waggon, lies the 'mineral representative of my whole working life's strength!'

In such aspects as these, how momentous to ourselves is the natural possession of coal--of the fuel ever ready at a moment's preparation to generate a power the very opposite of its own nature-a power that transcends all others yet known to be applicable to mechanical movements; that disdains narrow imprisonment, and wings us or wafts us over land and seathat daily draws up from the deepest pits more and more of the mineral fuel that gave it birth and impulse- that makes tens of thousands of wheels and spindles to revolve incessantly,that causes raw materials to be wrought into airiest fabrics or solidest structures that transports navies and armies, changes the character of warfare by accelerating the transfer of men and the munitions of war, decides the fate of battles, and determines the destiny of nations. How momentous, we repeat, is the possession of the generator of all these movements! In our extensive beds of coal we have, in fact, the motive power of the world, stored up for us in the most compact and suitable form. In coal we have the world-moving lever of Archimedes, and it may be said that the steam engine is the fulcrum. Few econo