Dudley, Wednesbury, and Walsall, with Birmingham for its real center. Other carboniferous deposits occur in Coalbrookdale, in the crowded South Wales district, and near Bristol. If all these are put together, it will be seen that they compose almost all the great foci of British life and manufactures at the present day.
On the other hand, what are the great towns in the secondary and tertiary southeastern tract? London, the main distributing center, preserved by its navigable river, and its official importance. Southampton, a convenient Indian and South American port. Plymouth and Portsmouth, two government naval stations. Chatham, an artificial creation for purposes of war. Scarborough, Brighton, Cheltenham, Bath, and half a dozen other lounges for the moneyed classes. All these ultimately depend for existence upon the wealth created elsewhere. Leicester is almost the only town in purely Teutonic England which now earns a good livelihood by industries unconnected with the sea or with warlike preparations. Turning to the north, Edinburgh survives by its traditional position as a metropolis and as the center of the Scottish Church, the Scottish law, and to some extent the Scottish aristocracy, as well as by its possession of a university and a great cultivated society. But Edinburgh itself stands on a primary site.
The specialties of the modern system are far too numerous to allow even of passing exemplification. Here coal, there iron, in other places lead or tin, forms the source of wealth and the determining cause of human aggregation. The potteries draw men to Staffordshire; finer clays produce the ware of Worcester, Lambeth, or Dunmore. Flags for paving are largely worked in North Wales. Lime from blue lias keeps alive more than one small seacoast town. Even gold is mined near Dolgelley in Merionethshire. Phosphate of lime is collected as mineral manure. Cutler's green-stone and beds of jasper are found among the Cambrian rocks. Millstones, hearthstones, and fire-clay are other useful economic products. Terra-cotta is made at Watcombe, near Torquay. Epsom salts are manufactured from magnesian limestone on the Tyne. Slates for roofing, plumbago, Cairngorm pebbles, afford occupation in other parts to quarrymen and lapidaries. Glass can only be made where flints are obtainable. Whitby derives a small fortune from alum, jet, and the sale of fossils. Guernsey lives largely by exporting its granite as road metal to London. Whetstones supply an industry to Whittle Hill, and slate-pencils to Shap in Cumberland. But perhaps the strangest trade of all is that of the gun-flints, still manufactured at Brandon and Norwich to supply the savages of Africa, whither all the old flint-locks of Europe were shipped on the invention of percussion caps.[1] The water-supply everywhere depends upon geological conditions. Even our pleasure resorts and
- ↑ I owe this, with many other facts, to Mr. H. B. Woodward's interesting "Geology of England and Wales."
