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.