Extensive coal beds in Asia are probably Tertiary, while the vast
carbon beds among the Rocky Mountains, and underlying the vast plain
to the west of these mountains, were formed in the Tertiary period. The
Rocky Mountain plateau on which the coal beds are planted existed as a
sea bottom over which the waters from the Arctic world rolled during
the Tertiary period. The Rocky Mountain region was then sleeping in the
sea.
The Tertiary beds reach from Mexico to the Arctic ocean, proving that
currents ran toward the equator along the valley of the McKenzie,
bearing into southern waters whatever fell from the upper world. It is
thus easy to see how the vast expanse of this western world became the
receptacle of Tertiary carbon. Finding no Tertiary coals on the Eastern
border of our continent we are led to believe that a narrow continent
stretched from America to Europe across the present bed of the Atlantic
and hindered the flow of carbon along the Atlantic seaboard. It is
now conceded by geologists that such an isthmus of land reached from
Newfoundland to the shores of Europe during the Tertiary period. This
being true a vast fund of carbon must lie at the bottom of the North
Atlantic.
If these later coals had been formed out of vegetation growing in great
continental swamps, the same opportunity was afforded by the southern
sea borders for this swamp vegetation. And so from Long Island to the
Rio Grande. Why then do we not find it if coal is of vegetable origin?
If the vast fund of the lignitic coals is a vegetable production it
was present in the Tertiary atmosphere as a deadly poison. But at that
time both land and sea were full of air-breathing mammals and monsters
showing conclusively that it was not there in such a condition.