DEDUCTIONS.
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.