Science in Short Chapters. W. Mattieu Williams

      The prevalence of estuarine and lacustrine fossils in the Coal Measures is also in accordance with this: the constitution of coal-ash is perfectly so. Its extreme softness and fineness of structure; its chemical resemblance to the rocks around, and above, and below; and oblong basin form common to our coal seams; the apparent contradiction of such total destruction of vegetable structure common to the true coal seams, while immediately above and below them are delicate structures well preserved, is explained by the more rapid deposition of the latter, and the slow soddening of the former as above described.

      I do not, however, offer this as an explanation of the formation of every kind of coal. On the contrary, I am satisfied that cannel coal, and the black shales usually associated with it, have a different origin from that of the ordinary varieties of bituminous coal. The fact that the products of distillation of cannel and these shales form different series of hydrocarbons from those of common coal, and that they are nearly identical with those obtained by the distillation of peat, is suggestive of origin in peat-bogs, or something analogous to them.

      To the above I may add the concluding sentences of the chapter on Coal in Lyell’s “Elements of Geology.” Speaking of fossils in the Coal Measures, he says: “The rarity of air-breathers is a very remarkable fact when we reflect that our opportunities of examining strata in close connection with ancient land exceed in this case all that we enjoy in regard to any other formations, whether primary, secondary, or tertiary. We have ransacked hundreds of soils replete with the fossil roots of trees, have dug out hundreds of erect trunks and stumps which stood in the position in which they grew, have broken up myriads of cubic feet of fuel still retaining its vegetable structure, and, after all, we continue almost as much in the dark respecting the invertebrate air-breathers of this epoch, as if the coal had been thrown down in mid-ocean. The early date of the carboniferous strata cannot explain the enigma, because we know that while the land supported a luxuriant vegetation, the contemporaneous seas swarmed with life—with Articulata, Mollusca, Radiata, and Fishes. We must, therefore, collect more facts if we expect to solve a problem which, in the present state of science, cannot but excite our wonder; and we must remember how much the conditions of this problem have varied within the last twenty years. We must be content to impute the scantiness of our data and our present perplexity partly to our want of diligence as collectors, and partly to our want of skill as interpreters. We must also confess that our ignorance is great of the laws which govern the fossilization of land animals, whether of low or high degree.”

      The explanation of the origin of coal which I have given in the foregoing meets all these difficulties. It shows how vast accumulations of vegetable matter may have been formed “in close connection with the ancient land,” and yet “as if the coal had been thrown down in mid-ocean” as far as the remains of terrestrial animals are concerned. It explains the nearly total absence of land shells, and of the remains of other animals that must have lived in the forests producing the coal, and which would have been buried there with the coal had it been formed on land as usually supposed. It also meets the cases of the rare and curious exceptions, seeing that occasionally a land animal would here and there be drowned in such fjords under circumstances favorable to its fossilization.