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 has been 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 wise Providence 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 speculating about 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 (the _anthrax_). 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 termed _lapis ampelites_, is generally
understood to mean our cannel coal, which they used not as fuel, but in
making toys, bracelets, and other ornaments; while their _carbo_, 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. In
their 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 with _natural_ coal, 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 signifies
_charcoal_, appears to have passed into the northern languages, as in
the Islandic _gloa_; the Danish _gloe_; the Welsh _glo_, a coal, _golen_
to give light; the Irish _o-gual_; and the Cornish _kolan_—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
of _o-gual_, and in that of _kolan_ by 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 mountains through 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 about
THIRTY-TWO MILLIONS of tons annually. The export is about SIX 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 coming events, 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 from what 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 as _humus_ into
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 was INTENDED to 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
in the 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 their parts, 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 and Lyell, 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 onward by 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 the _intermediate succeeding_ epochs 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 not COAL. 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 of this
question, is the position which MAN occupies, 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 the REVEALED destiny 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’s crust 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.
[Illustration: 1. Sigillaria pachyderma. 2. Stigmaria ficoides. 3.
Lepidodendron Sternbergii.]