An indication of the immense business being done in the iron trade is the congestion of the tracks by cars loaded with the products of the mills in the vicinity of Homestead, Pa., and other manufacturing points. In one yard there were six miles of cars waiting movement one day in te early part of last month.

The prediction of Edward W. Parker, of the United States Geological Survey, of a coal famine in fifty years, is disputed by the officers of the Heading Coal Company, who say that their company alone can supply the world with anthracite for the next fifty years. They estimate that in the virgin basin of hard coal extending from Pottsville up the Schuylkill Valley toward Tamaqua there are 5,000,000,000 tons of anthracite. " It is true that the coal supply in the upper part of the region has reached its limit," they say, "and more and more the great southern basin, owned exclusively by the Reading Company, must be drawn upon to a greater extent, but it is also strictly true to say that within ten miles of the Reading Coal & Iron Company's headquarters in Pottsville there is as much hard coal as has ever been mined." It was in this un-mined region that hard coal was discovered, and it was also in this region that the utility of hard coal for blast furnaces was first established. The shallow veins north of this region proved cheaper to operate, and as a consequence the big basin of the Reading Company has remained almost untouched. The coal in this basin lies much deeper than the veins operated at present by the company, and the expense of mining will be correspondingly greater. This will not be superlatively cheerful news to the consumer. He may console himself, of course, that he will be able to keep himself reasonably warm for the next fifty years, but the realization that he will have to pay more each year for the pleasure of keeping warm will more than offset the consolation.

Later details show that the recent eruption of Mont Pelee was nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing of any great moment has occurred to tbe volcano since last October. Last year a great obelisk or needle was thrust out of the crater, to a height of a thousand feet. It suffered several subsidences, followed sometimes by new elevations, but finally collapsed or sank back into the funnel from which it had been forced in August of last year. Since then its place has been taken by a dome, and this dome has undergone similar changes in height, though on a lesser scale, to those exhibited by the obelisk. More than once the dome was blown out by eruptions, and during December last it sank about 90 feet. Since then, however, it has risen again, and now a new phenomena is making its appearance. The obelisk which disappeared a year ago, or else a new one, is being pushed up through the dome. It is being built up or thrust up slowly; but it has gained 100 feet in this year, and the mountain as a whole is recovering the height which subsidences took away from it in the winter.