IS COAL A VEGETABLE PRODUCT?
The usually accepted theory concerning the origin of coal is that it was formed from an ancient vegetation that grew largely in peat and swamp marshes. This theory the Vailan system overthrows.
Every atom of the great mass of carbon now forming the coal deposits must have been a distilled product of a primitive igneous process before the plant could possibly appropriate it. Every intelligent chemist knows that the great telluric gas furnace of primitive times was competent to produce all the carbon now found in the crust of the earth. Soot, that sometimes takes fire in our chimneys, is deposited in infinitesimal smoke particles. Hence, smoke from burning carbon is simply a fuel which makes it evident that the smoke which arose from the igneous earth was a fuel hydro-carbon. The dark belts of Saturn and Jupiter are doubtless strata of carbon revolving about those planets.
If the Vailan theory is true the graphites and heavier forms of carbon were the first to fall upon the earth after the igneous period was passed, and will be found in its first aqueous beds, and generally unassociated with fossil vegetation. This is precisely what we do find. Both Dana and Dawson bear testimony to the fact that graphite is a very common mineral in the older beds, and that the primitive carbon beds are equal in gravity to that of similar areas in the carboniferous system.
Why no fossil plants in the earlier coal deposits? Because no plants grew at that time. Then we must look for its origin elsewhere than in plants. If coal be a vegetable product, so is graphite. To say that animal organism aided in the process simply adds to the difficulty, since it is carbon that makes the organism and not the organism the carbon. But suppose fossil plants were found in graphite, would it be any more evidence that they formed it than that they formed clay or sandrock in which they are found? The simple fact that organic fossils are found in carbon beds changed to carbon affords no evidence that these organisms made the beds.
We find vegetable remains in coal seams just as we find them in any other rock. A coal plant as a lepidodendron, may begin in the lower clay, and pierce through a coal seam into the overhanging shale and sandstone. In the first it is a clay fossil, in the second a carbonaceous fossil, and in the third a silicious fossil. The fact is the trunk of a tree in an upright position in a coal bed, which is quite common, proves that the coal formed around it rapidly. It would require forty feet of vegetable debris to make five feet of carbon. Some coal seams are 300 feet thick, which would require at least 2,400 feet of vegetable growth in its formation, which is an impossibility. As a vegetable product coal would form very slowly, but from the Vailan system would require but a few hours, or days at most, to lay it down.
Plants found in coal burn with difficulty, which ought not to be true if they contained a resinous sap, or bituminous matter. In many instances you can find a dozen fossil plants in the overlying clay to where you can find one in coal. They are clay fossils because they are imbedded in clay, same as fossils in coal are carbon because imbedded in carbon.
If coal is compressed peat, as some would have us believe, why do we not find fibres running vertically through it? You may examine peat after a pressure of twenty tons to the square inch has been exerted, and yet the vertical structure of the mass will be apparent. Since we find abundance of rootlets running in all directions, vertically as well as horizontally in the under clays of coal beds it is evident that coal is not a metamorphosed peat.
Imagine an expanse of marshes 100,000 square miles in extent, covered with calamites, ferns, sigillaria, lepidodendra remaining motionless for countless centuries, and then suddenly sinking beneath the waves of the sea in order to receive a sea-formed bed for a covering; and in the universal burial to preserve but a few fossils, and they in a horizontal position, while in the clays immediately above and below the coal beds they are found in profusion; that in due time the vast area arose from its baptism, and on the thin layer of clay millions of the same plants grew until they formed another bed of coal, when it sinks again beneath the waves, and this oscillation continued until it had been buried twenty, forty or one hundred times, and you have the old theory of how coal was formed.
But if the old theory concerning the formation of coal is correct, how did it occur that the earth in rising out of the ocean stopped each time in the right place for swamp vegetation to accumulate? According to the highest authority coal is not formed from sea-plants, for they cannot emit any considerable amount of caloric, but it is the product of land plants. Then why do we find coal scattered over a vast area of sea bottom?
The structure of continents show that they have remained such from their first formation. Some of the geologic formations, as the Carboniferous-conglomerates, took place all over the earth at the same time. How could this be except it came from the Annular system?
Were we to have a shower of carbon dust it would settle to the bottom of the sea all over the irregularities of the same. Then sand beds accumulating for ages would settle over it. These would form a greater thickness in some places than in others; hence a succeeding fall of carbon settling upon the ocean floor would not form a bed exactly parallel with the first. This is precisely what we find to be true in the carbon deposits. The distance in coal seams may vary from twenty feet in one place to forty feet in another place in the same neighborhood, which is the result of irregularity in the ocean floor.
Bowlders are found in coal seams which means that coal beds have been formed under water; and if a foreign bowlder that the coal seam was formed at the bottom of the ocean. Bowlders have been found in the middle of coal seams with glacial marks upon them, showing that they have been dropped from icebergs into the forming coal beds at the bottom of the sea. Foreign water-worn bowlders are frequently found in coal beds.
Stratas of coal may be separated by layers of clay not more than half an inch in thickness; how could vegetation take root in so thin a layer of clay sufficient to form the overlying coal seam of probably several feet? Suppose a great carbon fund should float from the Arctic ocean into Hudson Bay. It would settle upon an undulating bottom, and if a flood of muddy water from the surrounding rivers should empty into the bay while the carbon bed was forming, a thin clay bed would be the result. This might continue as long as the carbon was brought from the Arctic regions.
The floating mass of primitive carbon clouds after they entered the atmosphere and floated away for centuries, perhaps, toward the polar regions in their efforts to reach the earth, became a tissue of evolving vegetable organisms and vegetable forms. Take fresh soot from a furnace soon as it is formed, subject it to hot vapors from boiling waters and store it away in an open vessel of water, and you will soon see vegetable and animal organisms start into being. Then why not find organisms in revolving soot clouds in the Annular system?
Marine vegetation exists on the sea bottom, and a carbon sediment rapidly accumulating would certainly involve it.
Under almost all the carbon veins lies a deposit of fire clay. Strange that adjoining a highly combustible bed, a substance should be invariably planted that is so refractory as to be used for crucibles in fusing almost every known metal! In this bed lies involved a profuse marine vegetation, and the preservation of its delicate lineaments proves that it was suddenly involved. It is more generally present under coal veins that are more distant from the tropics, and invariably in the most distant ones. The fire clay-dust sublimed in the great telluric crucible arose to commingle with primitive vapors and returned with them. When a carbon fall occurred the clay matter being of greater specific gravity was the first to find its way to the ocean floor.
This fire clay is found under beds of primitive graphite where no vegetation is involved, and therefore cannot be a vegetable distillation. It is found where glacial action is unknown, and cannot be mud pulverized by moving ice. Every one of the more than seventy coal seams of the Nova Scotia regions has its characteristic clay-bed. When we see trees standing in and surrounded by this clay we are forced to admit a rapid accumulation.
Limestone is a deep sea formation and the Vailan system demands that standing trees should not be found in it. Only such limestone formation or strata as were deposited as mechanical precipitation could be formed in shallow waters, especially in regions beyond the tropics. A limestone stratum deposited among shore deposits or continental detritus points directly to Annular origin and vegetable fossils will occur in the upper clays. Here geologists have an opportunity to prove or disprove the Annular problem.
Coal and peat are not found in the tropics where they ought to be found if vegetation produced them. And if they could be found there it would sweep the Vailan system from its foundations. They are found, however, just where this system says they must be found. Why is peat found in the ocean, and in the thousands of lakes and ponds where no peat vegetation is now growing? Suppose we find a peat bed forty feet thick, it must have been at one time a lake with forty feet of water, and how did the peat begin to grow? Peat forms slowly and the rains and storms would have worked mud, etc., more rapidly into it than the peat would have filled it. It would neither have grown from the top nor from the bottom. The foundation carbon fell from the Annular fund.