them, than the Bunker Hill Monument, or the steeple of
Trinity Church, in New York. These tall chimneys are seen rising every
where, all around the horizon, and sending up volumes of dense black
smoke, which comes pouring incessantly from their summits, and thence
floating majestically away, mingles itself with the clouds of the sky.

The reason of this is, that the strata of rocks which lie beneath the
ground in all this region consist, in a great measure, of beds of coal
and of iron ore. The miners dig down in almost any spot, and find iron
ore; and very near it, and sometimes in the same pit, they find plenty
of coal. These pits are like monstrous wells; very wide at the mouth,
and extending down four or five times as far as the height of the
tallest steeples, into the bowels of the earth. Over the mouth of the
pit the workmen build a machine, with ropes and a monstrous wheel, to
hoist the coal and iron up by, and all around they set up furnaces to
smelt the ore and turn it into iron. Then, at suitable places in various
parts of the country, they construct great rolling mills and founderies.
The rolling mills are to turn the pig iron into wrought iron, and to
manufacture it into bars and sheets, and rails for the railroads; and
the founderies are to cast it into the form of great wheels, and
cylinders, and beams for machinery, or for any other purpose that may be
required.

The mines in the valley of the Clyde were worked first chiefly for the
coal, and the coal was used to drive steam machinery for spinning and
weaving, and for other manufacturing purposes. The river was in those
days a small and insignificant stream. It was only about five feet deep,
so that the vessels that came to take away the coal and the manufactured
goods had to stop near the mouth of it, and the cargoes were brought
down to them in boats and lighters. But in process of time they widened
and deepened the river. They dug out the mud from the bottom of it, and
built walls along the banks; and in the course of the last hundred
years, they have improved it so much that now the largest ships can come
quite up to Glasgow. The water is eighteen or twenty feet deep all the
way.

The Clyde is the river on which steamboats were first built in Great
Britain. The man who was the first in England or Scotland that found a
way of making a steam engine that could be put in a boat and made to
turn paddle wheels so as to drive the boat along, was James Watt,