Abstract
(1) THE bare facts of the recent discovery of coal- measures at Shakespeare Cliff, near Dover, have been published in the press, and the full account cannot be written till the completion of the inquiry which is now going on. It is, however, not unfitting that the bearing of the discovery on the general question of the existence of workable coal-fields in Southern England should be discussed within these walls, not merely on account of its general interest, but because it naturally follows the paper read by Mr. Godwin-Austen before the Royal Institution, in 1858, “On the Probability of Coal beneath the South-Eastern parts of England.” In 1855 he had placed before the Geological Society of London the possibility of the existence of coal in South-Eastern England at a workable depth. In the two years which had elapsed, “the possibility” had grown in his mind into the “probability,” and in the thirty-two years which have passed between the date of the paper before this Institution and the present time, “the probability” has been converted into a certainty by the recent discovery at Dover. In this communication, the lines of the inquiry laid down by Godwin-Austen will be strictly followed. We must first examine the conditions under which the coal-measures were accumulated.
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The Search for Coal in the South of England1. Nature 42, 319–322 (1890). https://doi.org/10.1038/042319a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/042319a0