TERTIARY COALS.
Extensive coal beds in Asia are probably Tertiary, while the vast carbon beds among the Rocky Mountains, and underlying the vast plain to the west of these mountains, were formed in the Tertiary period. The Rocky Mountain plateau on which the coal beds are planted existed as a sea bottom over which the waters from the Arctic world rolled during the Tertiary period. The Rocky Mountain region was then sleeping in the sea.
The Tertiary beds reach from Mexico to the Arctic ocean, proving that currents ran toward the equator along the valley of the McKenzie, bearing into southern waters whatever fell from the upper world. It is thus easy to see how the vast expanse of this western world became the receptacle of Tertiary carbon. Finding no Tertiary coals on the Eastern border of our continent we are led to believe that a narrow continent stretched from America to Europe across the present bed of the Atlantic and hindered the flow of carbon along the Atlantic seaboard. It is now conceded by geologists that such an isthmus of land reached from Newfoundland to the shores of Europe during the Tertiary period. This being true a vast fund of carbon must lie at the bottom of the North Atlantic.
If these later coals had been formed out of vegetation growing in great continental swamps, the same opportunity was afforded by the southern sea borders for this swamp vegetation. And so from Long Island to the Rio Grande. Why then do we not find it if coal is of vegetable origin? If the vast fund of the lignitic coals is a vegetable production it was present in the Tertiary atmosphere as a deadly poison. But at that time both land and sea were full of air-breathing mammals and monsters showing conclusively that it was not there in such a condition.