1. The plant when subjected to a proper mode of distillation is made to
yield carbon in various allotropic forms. So of any mineral that has
carbon in its constitution. These forms of carbon were placed in the
crust of the earth after the primitive fires had died out.
2. All such primitive distillations existed in the atmosphere of the
incandescent earth.
3. This matter as it declined and mingled with the atmosphere in after
ages, changed from the ring to the belt form, and overcanopied the
earth and fell largely in regions outside the tropics.
4. The heavier forms of carbon fell largely in the earlier ages; though
all sections of the system must have had some of each form.
5. All ages were more or less characterized by carbon falls, and no age
could be exclusively carboniferous.
6. Carbon falling directly into the ocean would separate into heavier
and lighter forms and settle accordingly in higher or lower elevations
of sea bottom, thus explaining why different forms of coal are found in
the same proximate horizon.
7. The earliest or heavier forms are free from organic remains, and
must therefore be a primitive distillation. The other carbon beds
by their associated strata; by their involved vegetation and other
organisms; by accompanying clay-partings; by involved glacial drift;
by latitudinal gradation in quantity of ash and specific gravity; by
characteristic absence from the tropics and the heavy deposits in
higher latitudes; by synchronous formation in all continents; by their
evident formation in the very lap and bosom of the glacier and in ice
and flood; by the fact that they are bituminous, oily hydro-carbons,
and by a multitude of inconsistencies and impossibilities involved
in the vegetation theory, have been shown to be actual sedimentary
deposits, and therefore a primitive product.
Since then there is not a feature connected with the formation of coal
that is not readily explained by the primitive carbon theory; not
one that philosophic law does not resolve into harmony with Annular
declension without even the show of conflict; and since vegetarians
are forever stumbling upon inexplicable difficulties--bowlders,
pebbles, undulations, slopes, ripple-marks, clay-partings, cannel-coal
inseparably joined with bituminous coal, anthracites with less
amount of ash, marine impurities, carbon planted in Archaean beds,
air-breathing animals among Tertiary coals, carbon dredged from the
ocean, dug from the frozen world, and innumerable other objections over
which they can not climb, the vegetation theory can not be true.