The first and most important element of the earth’s crust is carbon. Of
the more than 60,000 feet of aqueous beds there are probably none that
it does not enter into as an important factor. It was first driven
from the earth by intense heat. The burning world was a smoking world.
The unconsumed carbon commingled with the Annular vapors in the form
of black, sooty, pitchy matter. This was deposited at the time of the
deluge, and the waters that stood in seas, lakes and ponds deposited
it as a layer of black, carbonaceous mud upon their bottoms. It may
be found in ten thousand lakes planted in the Drift deposits in North
America and Northern Europe.
A black carbonaceous soil covers many Western States which were once
covered by a vast inland sea. This sea was bounded on the west by the
Rocky Mountains; south by the Ozark Mountains and the mountains of
Tennessee and Kentucky, and emptied its waters into Lake Michigan.
This great inland sea finally became a fresh-water body. The remains
of the mastodon, mammoth and other pachyderms of interdiluvian times,
as well as fresh-water shells are found. It made for itself two great
outlets, the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence rivers. This inland
sea must have been elevated 700 or 800 feet above the ocean, and was
surrounded on all sides by walls, and covered an area of at least
500,000 square miles. We must conclude that some great down-rush of
waters caused it to break its bounds in two directions at the same time.
The fall of waters supplied the black, sooty carbon that settled to
the bottom of the sea, remaining but a few inches thick on the hills,
perhaps, but several feet in the valleys, and is the source of the peat
bogs.