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?