Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children

by Charles Kingsley

But you said that the coal was made from plants and trees, and did plants and trees grow on this coral-reef?

That I cannot say. Trees may have grown on the dry parts of the reef, as cocoa-nuts grow now in the Pacific. But the coal was not laid down upon it till long afterwards, when it had gone through many and strange changes. For all through the chine of England, and in a part of Ireland too, there lies upon the top of the limestone a hard gritty rock, in some places three thousand feet thick, which is commonly called “the mill-stone grit.” And above that again the coal begins. Now to make that 3000 feet of hard rock, what must have happened? The sea-bottom must have sunk, slowly no doubt, carrying the coral-reefs down with it, 3000 feet at least. And meanwhile sand and mud, made from the wearing away of the old lands in the North must have settled down upon it. I say from the North—for there are no fossils, as far as I know, or sign of life, in these rocks of mill-stone grit; and therefore it is reasonable to suppose that they were brought from a cold current at the Pole, too cold to allow sea-beasts to live,—quite cold enough, certainly, to kill coral insects, who could only thrive in warm water coming from the South.

Then, to go on with my story, upon the top of these mill-stone grits came sand and mud, and peat, and trees, and plants, washed out to sea, as far as we can guess, from the mouths of vast rivers flowing from the West, rivers as vast as the Amazon, the Mississippi, or the Orinoco are now; and so in long ages, upon the top of the limestone and upon the top of the mill-stone grit, were laid down those beds of coal which you see burnt now in every fire.

But how did the coral-reefs rise till they became cliffs at Bristol and mountains in Yorkshire?

The earthquake steam, I suppose, raised them. One earthquake indeed, or series of earthquakes, there was, running along between Lancashire and Yorkshire, which made that vast crack and upheaval in the rocks, the Craven Fault, running, I believe, for more than a hundred miles, and lifting the rocks in some places several hundred feet. That earthquake helped to make the high hills which overhang Manchester and Preston, and all the manufacturing county of Lancashire. That earthquake helped to make the perpendicular cliff at Malham Cove, and many another beautiful bit of scenery. And that and other earthquakes, by heating the rocks from the fires below, may have helped to change them from soft coral into hard crystalline marble as you see them now, just as volcanic heat has hardened and purified the beautiful white marbles of Pentelicus and Paros in Greece, and Carrara in Italy, from which statues are carved unto this day. Or the same earthquake may have heated and hardened the limestones simply by grinding and squeezing them; or they may have been heated and hardened in the course of long ages simply by the weight of the thousands of feet of other rock which lay upon them. For pressure, you must remember, produces heat. When you strike flint and steel together, the pressure of the blow not only makes bits of steel fly off, but makes them fly off in red-hot sparks. When you hammer a piece of iron with a hammer, you will soon find it get quite warm. When you squeeze the air together in your pop-gun, you actually make the air inside warmer, till the pellet flies out, and the air expands and cools again. Nay, I believe you cannot hold up a stone on the palm of your hand without that stone after a while warming your hand, because it presses against you in trying to fall, and you press against it in trying to hold it up. And recollect above all the great and beautiful example of that law which you were lucky enough to see on the night of the 14th of November 1867, how those falling stars, as I told you then, were coming out of boundless space, colder than any ice on earth, and yet, simply by pressing against the air above our heads, they had their motion turned into heat, till they burned themselves up into trains of fiery dust. So remember that wherever you have pressure you have heat, and that the pressure of the upper rocks upon the lower is quite enough, some think, to account for the older and lower rocks being harder than the upper and newer ones.

But why should the lower rocks be older and the upper rocks newer? You told me just now that the high mountains in Wales were ages older than Windsor Forest, upon which we stand: but yet how much lower we are here than if we were on a Welsh mountain.

Ah, my dear child, of course that puzzles you, and I am afraid it must puzzle you still till we have another talk; or rather it seems to me that the best way to explain that puzzle to you would be for you and me to go a journey into the far west, and look into the matter for ourselves; and from here to the far west we will go, either in fancy or on a real railroad and steamboat, before we have another talk about these things.

Now it is time to stop. Is there anything more you want to know? for you look as if something was puzzling you still.

Were there any men in the world while all this was going on?

I think not. We have no proof that there were not: but also we have no proof that there were; the cave-men, of whom I told you, lived many ages after the coal was covered up. You seem to be sorry that there were no men in the world then.