Coal Beds | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 16, 1865

Coal Beds.

IN Review No. 22, was presented good testimony from Humboldt's Cosmos showing that the present coal beds are the immense and now petrified masses of vegetable matter that were buried by the flood. Concerning the coal beds in England, we have the following testimony going to show that they are of vegetable origin. "In Devonshire, there are beds of coal seventy feet in thickness, and where these beds are deepest, there the coal is blackest and heaviest; and those nearest the surface have the appearance of wood, and burn with a flame similar to the flame of wood."

The Encyclopedia Americana bears the following testimony: "Coal, excluding anthracite, has been supposed to be of vegetable origin. There is a remarkable graduation from bituminated wood, to perfect coal. In some varieties, the structure, and even the remains, of plants, are apparent, and its chemical composition agrees with that of vegetable matter. It is difficult to determine, however, in what manner it has been formed, or by what operations the vegetable matter from which it has originated, has been so far modified, as to have assumed the properties under which it exists."