When bituminous or lignitic coal, or even peat is subjected to a sufficient degree of heat it is converted into hard coal and sometimes into graphite. From this source some conclude that anthracite and all hard coals are metamorphosed beds of soft carbon. But how about the vast beds in aqueous crusts hundreds of miles from any igneous agencies? All anthracite coal changed from bituminous coal will contain a greater per cent. of ash than the coal from which it is derived. If it does not it is evidence that it never was bituminous coal.
Let us suppose a heavy fall of Annular carbon in the north Atlantic ocean, and that the Appalachian mountains were again under the sea. The carbon carried by the ocean currents southward would fall to the sea bottom in the more quiet waters. The heavy or anthracite dust would reach the bottom in deep waters where the lighter forms would not. Before the Appalachian upheaval, the eastern base of the system was farther out in the sea, and was in deeper waters than the western. The constitution of the coal itself, the condition of the sea bottom (sloping from the coast to the deep sea) point harmoniously to the annular origin of the carbon beds. The bituminous dust not being able to directly settle with the anthracite remained longer in suspension which accounts for its greater amount of ash. The farther south it floated, the more impure it became. The heaviest beds of anthracite will be found in the northern part of the great plateau, and principally in British America if the Vailan theory is true.
Fossil plants in coal are generally mineralized charcoal, and are difficult of combination. If the bed was composed of vegetable production the same difficulty would certainly characterize the mass. Hence the plant is simply a foreign body in a bed of mineral carbon. Coal seams have become so hard as to be planed off by eroding forces directly after being laid down, or before heavy beds had accumulated over them. Thus they could not have been formed by vegetable peat.
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.
DEDUCTIONS.
1. The plant when subjected to a proper mode of distillation is made to yield carbon in various allotropic forms. So of any mineral that has carbon in its constitution. These forms of carbon were placed in the crust of the earth after the primitive fires had died out.
2. All such primitive distillations existed in the atmosphere of the incandescent earth.