Formation of Coal Beds.
By J. B. Frisbie
In order to give some idea of the luxuriance of the vegetation of the primitive world, I refer to the immense masses of vegetable matter which were doubtless accumulated in currents and have been converted in a moist condition into coal. That coal has not been formed from vegetable fibers charred by fire, but that it has probably been produced in the moist way by the action of sulphuric acid, is strikingly demonstrated by the excellent observation made by Goppert on the conversion of a fragment of amber-tree into black coal. The coal and the unaltered amber lay side by side. Regarding the part which the lower forms of vegetation may have had in the formation of coal beds, I would instance the Saarbrucker coal measures, where 120 beds are superposed on one another, exclusive of a great many which are less than a foot in thickness; the coal beds of Johnstone, in Scotland, and those in the Creuzot, in Burgundy, are some of them, respectively, thirty and fifty feet in thickness, while in the forests of our temperate zones, the carbon contained in the trees growing over a certain area would hardly suffice, in space of a hundred years, to cover it with more than a stratum of seven French lines in thickness. In comparing this bed of carbon, seven lines in thickness, with beds of coal, we must not omit to consider the enormous pressure to which the latter have been subjected from superimposed rock, and which manifests itself in the flattened form of the stems of the trees found in these subterranean regions. The so-called wood-hills discovered in 1866 by Siromatskoi, on the south coast of the island of New Siberia, consist, according to Hedenstrom, of horizontal strata of sandstone, alternating with bituminous trunks of trees, forming a mound thirty fathoms in height; at the summit of which the stems were in a vertical position. The bed of drifted wood is visible at five versts' distance.” The above I extract from Alexander Von Humboldt’s Cosmos, Vol. I., p. 280, which is considered as good authority as can be given from a human source in such matters. The only comment I wish to add is the following from Spiritual Gifts, Vol. III., p. 79, the writer of which not only had no acquaintance with Humboldt’s works but knew not that any such theory existed as he has set forth above:— “In some places large quantities of these immense trees were thrown together and covered with stones and earth by the commotions of the flood. They have since petrified and become coal, which accounts for the large coal beds which are now found.” J. B. FRISBIE.