CHAPTER VIII.GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF COAL—GREAT COAL FIELD OF PENNSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA AND OHIO—COAL DEPOSITS OF ILLINOIS, INDIANA AND KENTUCKY—ECONOMIC HISTORY—CONDITIONS OF FORMATION.
Considered mineralogically, and now demonstrated beyond a doubt, coal and the diamond are found to be one and the same in substance, and nearly also in their modes of formation. Newton detected the properties of the diamond in its refractive power over the rays of light, and inferred that, like amber, it was an unctuous body crystallized. In the crucible he reduced it to a state of pure carbon, burning, volatilizing, and resulting in the same elementary products as charcoal. Liebig goes a step farther, and declares the diamond to be a crystalline residuum from decayed vegetables. The action of fire could not produce the mineral, but would rather have the effect of drawing out its inflammable tendencies. “Science,” he adds, “can point to no process capable of accounting for the origin and formation of diamonds, except that of decay. And there is the greatest reason for believing that they have been formed in a liquid.” Sir David Brewster, in his beautiful optical analysis, has arrived at the same general conclusions.
Coal is also a product of vegetable decay, collected and formed in a liquid. It has not crystallized, and therefore wants the sparkle and the luster of the diamond. It retains all the carbon, and more of the hydrogen, and is in consequence infinitely more useful and valuable than even the precious gem. It is carefully incased and preserved among the rocks of the earth, and thereby in like manner akin to the glittering idol, whose true habitat hasbeen found to be the sandstones[5]immediately overlying the carboniferous formation. Thus far the parallel can be traced between the two apparently very dissimilar and unequally prized minerals: in extent of substance and geographical distribution, the history of each stands apart.
I.The Geographical Distribution of the Coal Metals.—Our knowledge on this subject is increasing with every new geographical detail connected with the history of the earth. Until very recently the carboniferous system was supposed to be of very limited extent. The return of every vessel, engaged in a voyage of discovery or otherwise, brings tidings of some new island or continent on which it is found. The same tribes of plants and animals are everywhere observed to accompany the deposit—all presenting the same generic and often the same specific characters—and uniformly on the same great scale of development. This circumstance alone bespeaks a universal formation, when every region was capable of producing all the requisite conditions in climate, vegetables, corallines, and sea-bottom, and prepares the mind for the ready admission of the existence of the mineral in every unexplored quarter of the globe. Accordingly, all the great continents of the old world abound in coal. In Russia, the carboniferous system occupies, betwixt the Dnieper and the Don, an area of about eleven thousand square miles. India, China, and the Australian archipelago give up yearly more and more of the bituminous substance. Egypt is not destitute of the jetty mineral: for recently beds several feet thick have been discovered near Asuan, on the right bank of the Nile. The vast continent of America has it in proportion to its own vastness. And man, go where he will with the knowledge of the arts, and the diffusive blessings of religion and civilization, will always find that a wiseProvidence has anticipated his wants, and prepared the treasure for his use.
The coal formation in Scotland has been already traced as occupying the great central valley of the Lowlands, which separates the primitive crystalline and feldspathic rocks of the north from the silurian series of the southern border, and traversing the mainland from sea to sea. The middle and northern coal basins of England have an average uninterrupted stretch of about two hundred miles in length, by forty in breadth. The Bristol and Welsh coal-fields, are also very extensive. That of South Wales forms an immense double trough, comprised within a great oval elongated tract, betwixt St. Bride’s Bay, and Pontypool, with an anticlinal axis ranging east and west, and embracing an area of one thousand and fifty-five square miles. This is the largest coal-field in Britain, in which there are sixty-four seams of coal, of all qualities, from the highest bituminous to the purest anthracite, and having an aggregate thickness of one hundred and ninety-feet. In Ireland the coal basins are comparatively small, and isolated from one another: the principal workable seams are in the counties of Kilkenny, Tipperary, Cork, Tyrone, and the northern extremity of Roscommon.
The coal metals immediately present themselves on the French coast at Boulogne, more inland at Mons, and in the central district at St. Etienne, betwixt the valleys of the Loire and Rhone. This last basin is of small extent, but possesses great geological interest from its position among the primary and metamorphic rocks, and the materials of which the series is composed. The metals are inclosed in a long narrow trough, of about twenty-five miles by less than a mile at its greatest breadth. Granite, gneiss, mica-slate, underlie them throughout: instead of shales, and sandstones of the usual kind, the coals are imbedded in micaceous grit, and the detrital alluvia of the crystalline rocks. It has been described as a self contained repository, with its own furnishings and equipments all, as it were, self-originating: the vegetable matter is of native growth, the trees are still vertical, and in one part of the field present the appearance of a suddenly petrified forest; the iron, too, is native, and seems to have been actually smelted on the spot, by subterranean self-combustion.The coal, underlying one of the bands of ironstone, has undergone fusion, and been changed into coke; while sulphur and crystals of sulphate of lime have been separated in the crucible by the process of sublimation, as if to complete this scene of marvels.
In the low countries, at Namur and Liege, and other places along the banks of the Meuse—in Germany, Silesia, Moravia, Poland, the Carpathian Mountains—on the banks of the Volga, the Dnieper, and the Don, the coal-measures are found to occupy tracts of greater or lesser extent. These are sometimes accompanied with the usual alternating series entire and unbroken, sometimes with the absence of one or more members. In Russia the metals are imbedded in the middle mountain limestone series in one field, while in another district they are situated in the lower part of the series, or beneath the calcareous deposit, as in the thin beds of Fifeshire. The Liege coal-basin is of a remarkably complex structure—the metals lying in small hollows of contorted strata, which are bent and twisted like a sapling—elevated into every varying position and degree of inclination—and thus, by obtaining cross or horizontal sections, you pass repeatedly over the edges of the same beds. An enterprising Scotchman has long been lessee of one of these coal-fields, out of whose iron bands he has molded cannon and ball for every nation in Europe; and whose locomotives, forged from the same strata, now ply in pleasure excursions along every railway of the Netherlands and vine-clad banks of the Rhine and Moselle.
The American coal-fields, like its interminable forests, endless rivers, and everything in that vast continent, are all on the gigantic scale. The basin of the Mississippi, extending from the Rocky Mountains to the Alleghanies, forms an area equal to two-thirds of the states of Europe, almost every part of which is covered with the carboniferous limestone, supporting the coal metals and the newer palæozoic rocks. The great coal-field of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio, extends, according to Sir Charles Lyell, continuously from north-east to south-west for a distance of 207 miles, its breadth being in some places 180 miles. The basin of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, is not much inferior in dimensions to the whole of England, while another coal deposit, 170 by 100 miles, lies farther to the north, between lakes Michigan and Huron.Mr. Logan, in his report on the geology of Canada, states that the coal-measures occupy nearly the whole of New Brunswick, a great part of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton island, and the south-west district of Newfoundland. And in the most remote northern regions, along the shores of the frozen sea, and the various rivers and their tributaries which fall into it, the carboniferous rocks with their inclosed beds of coal, some of considerable thickness, are found to prevail. A single seam, of an average thickness of ten feet, occurs in Pennsylvania, in the district of Pittsburgh, covering a superficial extent of about 14,000 square miles; which shows how inexhaustible the resources, and how limitless the means, of social advancement, of progress in the arts and sciences, garnered up for the generations to come in that mighty continent.
Upon the authority of Sir Charles Lyell we learn, that all the floral fossil phenomena are substantially the same as in Europe—a great preponderance of stigmariæ, ferns, lepidodendra, and calamites—some consisting of trees in an erect position, and of broken trunks, with their rootlets attached, and extending in all directions; and the same grits or sandstones, are found, as those used for building near Edinburgh and Newcastle. Of forty-eight species of fossil plants or trees, detected in the strata of Nova Scotia, thirty-seven are identical with those discovered in the British beds; and, in the United States, thirty-five out of fifty-three species are described as specifically the same with the European fossils. But the most remarkable of Sir Charles’s discoveries is that, in the prodigious thickness and singular structure of the coal-basin in Nova Scotia, there are the remains of more than ten forests which rose up successively one over the other, and which, with their interposed layers of clays and solid stone, deposited at intervals, constitute a series of beds, whose vertical thickness is 14,570 feet.
II.The Economic History of Coal.—It does not appear, from any well authenticated records, at what precise period man availed himself of this useful mineral, either for the purposes of art, or of domestic comfort. The early history of nations is traditionary; but there is no tradition from very remote times, in any of them, as to the discovery of coal—no philosopher speculatingabout the importance of the fact and its bearings on the progress of civilization—no poet extolling the genius of the new Prometheus, that brought up the fiery combustible from the bowels of earth. The aborigines who dwelt amidst the primeval forests had no occasion to seek farther for fuel, when every hill and plain supplied them with all that was needed, and more than was convenient, as the cultivation of the soil engaged attention. Accident, doubtless, would first lead to the knowledge of the virtues of the hidden treasure. As the ground was cleared, and cities became populous, and the arts advanced, more diligence would be exercised in its search; and in proportion as it came, from the destruction of the woods, to be regarded as a necessary or luxury of life, coal would be sought for as an article of barter, or of commerce. Thus many ages might elapse before coal was introduced into general consumption, and though stored up specially for man, it was wisely ordered that the supplies and incumbrances on the surface should first be exhausted or removed, ere the inner chambers of his habitation were broken into and explored.
Bituminous matter, if not the carboniferous system itself, exists abundantly on the banks of the Euphrates. In the basin of the Nile coal has been recently detected. It occurs sparingly in some of the states of Greece: and Theophrastus, in his “History of Stones,” refers to mineral coal (lithanthrax) being found in Liguria, and in Elis, and used by the smiths; the stones are earthy, he adds, but kindle and burn like wood coals (theanthrax). But by none of the oriental nations does it appear that the vast latent powers and virtues of the mineral were thus early discovered, so as to render it an object of commerce or of geological research. What the Romans termedlapis ampelites, is generally understood to mean our cannel coal, which they used not as fuel, but in making toys, bracelets, and other ornaments; while theircarbo, which Pliny describes as “vehementer perlucet,” was simply the petroleum or naphtha, which issues so abundantly from all the tertiary deposits. Coal is found in Syria, and the term frequently occurs in the sacred writings. But there is no reference anywhere in the inspired record as to digging or boring for the mineral—no directions for its use—no instructions as to its constituting a portion of the promised treasures of the land. Intheir burnt-offerings, wood appears uniformly to have been employed; in Leviticus, the term is used as synonymous with fire, where it is said that “the priests shall lay the parts in order upon the wood, that is, on the fire which is upon the altar.” And in the same manner for all domestic purposes, wood and charcoal were invariably made use of. Doubtless the ancient Hebrews would be acquainted withnaturalcoal, as in the mountains of Lebanon, whither they continually resorted for their timber, seams of coal near Beirout were seen to protrude through the superincumbent strata in various directions. Still there are no traces of pits or excavations into the rock to show that they duly appreciated the extent and uses of the article. Their term גחל, which properly signifiescharcoal, appears to have passed into the northern languages, as in the Islandicgloa; the Danishgloe; the Welshglo, a coal,golento give light; the Irisho-gual; and the Cornishkolan—terms all expressive of the act of burning or of giving light.
For many reasons it would seem that, among modern nations, the primitive Britons were the first to avail themselves of the valuable combustible. The word by which it is designated is not of Saxon, but of British extraction, and is still employed to this day by the Irish, in their form ofo-gual, and in that ofkolanby the Cornish. In Yorkshire stone hammers and hatchets have been found in old mines, showing that the early Britons worked coals before the invasion of the Romans. Manchester,[6]which has risen upon the very ashes of the mineral, and grown to all its wealth and greatness under the influence of its heat and light, next claims the merit of the discovery. Portions of coal have been found under or imbedded in the sand of a Roman way, excavated some years ago for the construction of a house, and which, at the time, were ingeniously conjectured by the local antiquaries to have been collected for the use of the garrison, stationed on the route of these warlike invaders at Mancenion, or the Place of Tents. Certain it is, that fragments of coal are being constantly, in the district, washed out and brought down by the Medlock and other streams, which break from the mountainsthrough the coal strata. The attention of the inhabitants would, in this way, be the more early and readily attracted by the glistening substance.
Nevertheless, for long after, coal was but little valued or appreciated, turf and wood being the common articles of consumption throughout the country. About the middle of the ninth century, a grant of land was made by the Abbey of Peterborough, under the restriction of certain payments in kind to the monastery, among which are specified sixty carts of wood, and as showing their comparative worth, only twelve carts of pit-coal. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, Newcastle is said to have traded in the article, and by a charter of Henry III, of date 1284, a license is granted to the burgesses to dig for the mineral. About this period, coals, for the first time, began to be imported into London, but were made use of only by smiths, brewers, dyers, and other artisans, when, in consequence of the smoke being regarded as very injurious to the public health, Parliament petitioned the king, Edward I, to prohibit the burning of coal, on the ground of being an intolerable nuisance. A proclamation was granted, conformable to the prayer of the petition; and the most severe inquisitorial measures were adopted to restrict or altogether abolish the use of the combustible, by fine, imprisonment, and destruction of the furnaces and workshops! They were again brought into common use in the time of Charles I, and have continued to increase steadily with the extension of the arts and manufactures, and the advancing tide of population, until now, in the metropolis and suburbs, coals are annually consumed to the amount of about three millions of tons. The use of coal in Scotland seems to be connected with the rise of the monasteries, institutions which were admirably suited to the times, the conservators of learning, and pioneers of art and industry all over Europe, and in whose most rigorous exactions evidences can always be traced of a judicious and enlightened concern for the general improvement of the country. Under the regime of monastic rule at Dunfermline, coals were worked in the year 1291—at Dysart, and other places along the coast, about half a century later—and, generally, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the inhabitants were assessed in coals to the churches and chapels, which, after the Reformation,have still continued to be paid in many parishes. Boëthius records that, in his time, the inhabitants of Fife and the Lothians dug “a black stone,” which, when kindled, gave out a heat sufficient to melt iron.
How long will the coal-metals of the British isles last at the present, or even an increased expenditure of the fuel? So great has been the discrepancy, and so little understood the data on which to form a calculation, that the authorities variously estimate from two hundred to two thousand years. For home consumption the present rate is aboutthirty-two millionsof tons annually. The export is aboutsix millions: and yet such is the enormous mass of this combustible inclosed in one field alone, that no boundary can be fixed, even the most remote, for its exhaustion. The coal trade of Great Britain is nearly in the proportion of three to two of that of all the other nations of the world; while in superficial area her coal measures are to those of the United States only as 11,859 square miles to 133,132 square miles. What a vision of the future is hereby disclosed! If rightly employed, if the arts and progressive development of society at all keep pace with the means provided, the human race in the New World have a destiny to run, and a work of civilization to accomplish, to which the Old, in its brightest achievements, can furnish but a faint analogy. Scarcely two centuries have elapsed since coal was employed as an article of domestic use, or introduced upon the most limited scale into the manufactures; its now ascertained extent and boundless latent powers were not dreamt of or imagined even but half a century ago; and very recently the lamentation was general, that no coal-measures existed in the mighty continent of America. Who now can fancy a limit to the social movement with which that vast hemisphere is heaving all over—the advancing tide of its population spreading in every region—the forests cleared and covered with a net-work of railways, the rivers bridged from end to end with a navy of steamships—and all vivified and in motion through the agency of this long undiscovered product of the earth? Geological time rolled on, and the surface of our planet was replenished with the hidden treasure, and the man of science has no numbers to reckon the years that are past. More agreeable far to look through the vista of comingevents, where a moral era has commenced out of which a mightier series of phenomena will emerge, the purposes of a wise Providence be illustrated in so transmuting and preserving the entombed relics of distant ages, and the glories of the latter day arise, when the desert place shall teem with a new life, and the wilderness give praise to the Creator of all.
III. Universal, and shall we add, synchronous as a formation, there is a very interesting question connected with this subject, namely,is coal now forming? The general opinion among geologists leans to the affirmative side of the question, and that here, as in all the other cosmical arrangements going forward on the earth’s surface, time is the grand requisite. The necessary agencies are all at work, the other conditions are all admitted, and in the course of some future untold ages a new bituminous product will arise, similar in all respects to the old. The subject and the conclusions arrived at are not, however, free of many and great difficulties, to some of which we shall merely advert.
Reverting to all the circumstances connected with the geographical distribution of the coal metals, we are inclined to think that the era which produced them was not only peculiar in the wide geographical distribution of its families of plants, but equally, if not more so, in its limitation of all those physical conditions which were necessary for their conversion into coal. The basins, it will be observed, in which the vegetable matter was deposited, were, as compared with the existing ocean, small and shallow; for most of the plants and trees grew within their area or their immediate neighborhood, and are still found in their erect position, uninjured by roughing or transport in their smallest veinlets and even minute fructifications.
Then it is highly probable, that the great continents were not yet formed, but that a series of islands, barrier reefs, and inland seas, prevailed generally over the earth’s surface, being still chiefly oceanic. Consequently no great rivers could, in such circumstances, be in existence, rolling down like the Ganges, Nile, and Mississippi more stony detritus and mud than arborescent matter, and all to be mixed and confounded in one indiscriminate mass. Atmospheric influences, too, must have been widely different fromwhat they now are; for all the cast-off apparel of a summer’s luxuriance is, we see year after year, speedily dissipated by the droughts, or absorbed back ashumusinto the earth, and when spring returns the ground is parched and bare. A difference of temperature must also be taken into the list of modifying causes; for the plants, during the coal era, are nearly of a class—a few great types with little variety of structure—one and the same in every region—and approaching the characters, most of them, of the existing tropical flora. The climate, according to Mr. Bunbury, was characterized by excessive moisture, by a mild and steady temperature, and the entire absence of frost; and it has been established by Mr. Darwin’s interesting observations on Chiloe and other islands of the southern temperate zone, that extreme heat is not necessary to the existence of a very luxuriant and quasi-tropical vegetation. Mr. Austen, on the other hand, thinks that the temperature of Great Britain has not much changed since the coal period, because few of the fossil-ferns, found in the coal-measures, present any fructification, while those in more southern latitudes possess it; and, by experiments made by himself, it appears that the existing ferns of tropical climates would not fructify at a low temperature. Still, the great general fact remains unquestioned, that tree-ferns during the carboniferous age grew gigantically and in vast forests, where they do not grow at present over all the zones of the earth; and where now growing, in three out of the four zones, that the whole family are reduced to the size of small herbaceous plants.
Now, is it not a legitimate inference from all this, that, out of so many concurring circumstances, not one of which is similar in all respects now, a determinate effect wasintendedto be produced, and which cannot, in the altered condition of things, be produced again? The argument is cumulative, and bears the strongest presumptive evidence on its side. The carboniferous series cannot be repeated—not for want of vegetable or animal matter, for there is a hundred times more of both at present on the surface of the earth than perhaps ever existed in any former period—but because there are so many new causes now in operation, so many changes in the relative position of sea and land, to modify its distribution and qualities, and to influence its place inthe system generally, that the same conservative arrangements and chemical appliances cannot occur, nor any similar bituminous compound as a geological formation issue from Nature’s laboratory.
Leonard Horner, in enumerating the difficulties connected with the formation of the coal deposit upon the theory of the whole of the matter, vegetable and earthy, being spread over the sea-bottom, says—“That the terrestrial vegetable matter, from which coal has been formed, has in very many instances been deposited in the sea, is unquestionable, from their alternations with limestones containing marine remains.” Such deposits and alternations in an estuary at the mouth of a great river are conceivable; but whether such enormous beds of limestone, with the corals and molluscs which they contain, could be formed in an estuary, may admit of doubt. But it is not so easy to conceive the very distinct separation of the coal and the stony matter, if formed of drifted materials brought into the bay by a river. It has been said that the vegetable matter is brought down at intervals, in freshets, in masses united together, like the rafts in the Mississippi. But there could not be masses of matted vegetable matter of uniform thickness, 14,000 square miles in extent, like the Brownsville bed on the Monongahela and Ohio (the Pittsburgh seam): and freshets bring down gravel, and sand, and mud, as well as plants and trees. They must occur several times a year in every river; but many years must have elapsed during the gradual deposit of the sandstones and shales that separate the seams of coal. Humboldt tells us (“Cosmos,” p. 295),—That in the forest lands of the temperate zone, the carbon contained in the trees on a given surface would not, on an average of a hundred years, form a layer over that surface more than seven lines in thickness. If this be a well-ascertained fact, what an enormous accumulation of vegetable matter must be required to form a coal-seam of even moderate dimensions! It is extremely improbable that the vegetable matter brought down by rivers could fall to the bottom of the sea in clear unmixed layers; it would form a confused mass with stones, sand, and mud. Again, how difficult to conceive, how extremely improbable in such circumstances, is the preservation of delicate plants, spread out with the most perfect arrangement of theirparts, uninjured by the rude action of rapid streams and currents, carrying gravel and sand, and branches and trunks of trees?”
Nor, according to Mr. Horner, are the objections to the lacustrine theory, requiring so many oscillations of land and water, of less magnitude. “In the theory,” he says, “which accounts for the formation of beds of coal, by supposing that they are the remains of trees and other plants that grew on the spot where the coal now exists, that the land was submerged to admit of the covering of sandstones or shale being deposited, and again elevated, so that the sandstone or shale might become the subsoil of a new growth, to be again submerged, and this process repeated as often as there are seams of coal in the series—these are demands on our assent of a most startling kind. The materials of each of these seams, however thin (and there are some not an inch thick, lying upon and covered by great depths of sandstones and shales), must, according to this theory, have grown on land, and the covering of each must have been deposited under water.—There must thus have been an equal number of successive upward and downward movements, and these so gentle, such soft heavings, as not to break the continuity, or disturb the parallelism of horizontal lines spread over hundreds of square miles; and the movements must, moreover, have been so nicely adjusted, that they should always be downward when a layer of vegetable matter was to be covered up; and, in the upward movements, the motion must always have ceased so soon as the last layers of sand or shale had reached the surface, to be immediately covered by the fresh vegetable growth; for otherwise we should have found evidence, in the series of successive deposits, of some being furrowed, broken up, or covered with pebbles or other detrital matter of land, long exposed to the waves breaking on a shore, and to meteoric agencies. These conditions, which seem to be inseparable from the theory in question, it would be difficult to find anything analogous to in any other case of changes in the relative level of sea and land with which we are acquainted.”
While these statements show that we are still but imperfectly acquainted with all the conditions and circumstances under which coal was formed, two deductions may be made from them, not only as against the rival theories themselves, of Murchison andLyell, but still more strongly against the application of either theory to existing causes in the formation of the true bituminous product. In the first place, the vegetable matter brought down by the rivers, and spread over the bottom of the sea, does not amount to an infinitesimal fraction of what constitutes the enormous compound of the carboniferous age; and a different effect, according to the laws of nature of which we have experience, will necessarily result from the causes now in operation. Secondly, whatever, as a question of fact, it may have been with our coal-basins in the times gone by, certain it is that NOW there are no such oscillatory movements, causing the required changes in the relative level of sea and land, in those quarters of the globe the most densely covered with forests and jungle, and out of which the new coal-measures are expected to rise. The thin accumulations of woody residuum, observed by Sir Charles Lyell, in the sections exposed along the banks of rivers, railways, and other passages through American prairies and forests, are all unfavorably circumstanced—firm as the everlasting hills on their rocky foundations.
We may be reminded of the numberless ages required for the production of coal, that man’s experience is but of yesterday, and himself an ephemeral of a moment as compared with the revolutions of time recorded on the fabric of the globe. This record, we have reason to think, should be vastly abridged. But grant it, for the sake of argument, in all its indefinite dimensions, and still the answer is, that a moment in a question of this kind is just as instructive as the lapse of a million of years. Time, while it witnesses change, does not create or of itself produce anything. It is rather a passive than an active agent. Time marks on its horoscope the effects of existing causes, but the causes themselves it neither fashions or eliminates. Geologists enter into minute calculations as to the annual decay of vegetables, and the transporting powers of water, the waste of forests and the uptearing of hurricanes. Grant them all to be correct, and the data in these respects to be unchallengeably sound, we again beg them to consider that the Mississippi bears on its bosom the earthy spoils of half a continent—that the Ganges mixes in its fabled flood the varied wreck of all the Himalaya,—and when all are duly borne onwardby these and the mighty rivers elsewhere on the globe, that the arrangement of the mingled composite has yet to be effected—the clays, sands, coals, conglomerates, all in their serial superposition—the separation of the clean from the unclean—and where is the agency thus to dispose and to proportion? The deep says, it is not in me. The rivers show it is not in them. Are there any cosmical affinities in the things themselves to cause each to each, kind to kind, to take their respective places?
When we are told, that we know not what is going on in the depths of ocean, and other hollow places of the earth, our answer is two-fold. For first we reply, there were depths and hollows, lakes, estuaries, and seas, during all theintermediate succeedingepochs to the present age, and no true coal was produced: accumulation after accumulation of detrital alluvia followed, lapidified, and was distributed over extensive areas, and common to every region of the globe; but the real bituminous treasure has not been uniformly an accompaniment. A second answer is, that when and where vegetable matter, in any quantity, did accumulate, the result of the process was notcoal. The lignites of the tertiary deposits, and many of the oolites, have been subjected to the first and second stages only in those changes which plants undergo in their transition into the bituminous combustible. Nature in these instances, if we may use the expression, has made the effort, but the same results have not followed; the process is incomplete, and the product is only in patches. If we are reminded of the great oolitic deposit of Richmond, in Virginia, re-examined and pronounced to be so by Sir C. Lyell, some may still say non-content, that the problem is not yet solved as to the true position of the coal there. Many anomalies in geognostic arrangements occur in that vast continent: many of the intermediate series up to the chalk are absent altogether, and the sandstones, discriminating the new from the old red, are not fully determined. Lignite, in considerable quantity, exists among the tertiary deposits of the Alps, and has recently been found in the north-west provinces of India, in the vicinity of Kalibag; but all partaking of the usual qualities—wood, only partially altered by inhumation, and imperfectly adapted for domestic purposes.
One overwhelming consideration with us, in the discussion ofthis question, is the position whichmanoccupies, and the part he now plays on the theater of creation. The beasts and quadrupeds of the earth do not appear to have been formed so early as the carboniferous epoch. Had they existed at the period it is impossible to say what effects would have resulted from their graminivorous propensities in modifying the amount of the vegetable exuviæ. But man has appeared, modifying, changing, controlling everything—the earth and all its stores under his dominion—and all submissive to his will. He has little influence, indeed, over the more solid departments or structure of the globe—the form of its continents—the direction of its oceanic currents—the rise of islands and depression of land—the movements of the earthquake, and fiery torrents of the volcano; but over all its living products, especially its vegetable and terrestrial animal tribes, his influence is immense—increasingly incalculable. And, the geologist says, had this new denizen left the earth to itself, and nature to her own arrangements—were there no tilling, draining, and reaping—were the jungle and the wilderness to be still uninvaded—the marsh and the lagoon to welter in their dreary desolation—a vast coal deposit would be preparing in all the great lakes and seas of the globe. These postulates and conditions, however, can no longer be granted. Every day and every season they are all curtailed and limited in their influences. Man cuts down the forest, and applies it in its green, woody state to his own use.—The waste is reclaimed. The desert he makes his habitation; a place of beauty and civilization. The moral triumphs over the material, the spiritual over the earthy, and his charter-right is to subdue all things to himself. Thus the geologist cannot, if he would, forget or overlook the remarkable human epoch in which his own lot has been cast. As regards the future, there is a new element to which a due place must be assigned in his speculations; and all the great revolutions, and after-phases of our globe, he must henceforth read and interpret in therevealeddestiny of his own race.
Finally, let it be assumed, in the argument for the geologists, that vast masses of vegetable matter are already stored up and duly arranged over the sea-bottom, that more is continually accumulating, and that there is heat enough under the earth’scrust to bituminize and indurate the whole. A new coal epoch is thus approaching, or rather, even now, we are living within its influences. But the question occurs, when completed, of what avail would it be to man, who would inevitably be swept off the earth in the elevation and breaking up of the strata from the depths beneath? Geology makes known the undoubted fact, that our planet has been subjected to many and most extensive changes before it was reduced to its present condition. These, from the beginning, have been all found subservient to the improvement and well-being of the human family. The next, upon a similar scale of magnitude, would inevitably prove the destruction of the race.
1. Sigillaria pachyderma. 2. Stigmaria ficoides. 3. Lepidodendron Sternbergii.
1. Sigillaria pachyderma. 2. Stigmaria ficoides. 3. Lepidodendron Sternbergii.
1. Sigillaria pachyderma. 2. Stigmaria ficoides. 3. Lepidodendron Sternbergii.