3. This matter as it declined and mingled with the atmosphere in after ages, changed from the ring to the belt form, and overcanopied the earth and fell largely in regions outside the tropics.
4. The heavier forms of carbon fell largely in the earlier ages; though all sections of the system must have had some of each form.
5. All ages were more or less characterized by carbon falls, and no age could be exclusively carboniferous.
6. Carbon falling directly into the ocean would separate into heavier and lighter forms and settle accordingly in higher or lower elevations of sea bottom, thus explaining why different forms of coal are found in the same proximate horizon.
7. The earliest or heavier forms are free from organic remains, and must therefore be a primitive distillation. The other carbon beds by their associated strata; by their involved vegetation and other organisms; by accompanying clay-partings; by involved glacial drift; by latitudinal gradation in quantity of ash and specific gravity; by characteristic absence from the tropics and the heavy deposits in higher latitudes; by synchronous formation in all continents; by their evident formation in the very lap and bosom of the glacier and in ice and flood; by the fact that they are bituminous, oily hydro-carbons, and by a multitude of inconsistencies and impossibilities involved in the vegetation theory, have been shown to be actual sedimentary deposits, and therefore a primitive product.
Since then there is not a feature connected with the formation of coal that is not readily explained by the primitive carbon theory; not one that philosophic law does not resolve into harmony with Annular declension without even the show of conflict; and since vegetarians are forever stumbling upon inexplicable difficulties—bowlders, pebbles, undulations, slopes, ripple-marks, clay-partings, cannel-coal inseparably joined with bituminous coal, anthracites with less amount of ash, marine impurities, carbon planted in Archaean beds, air-breathing animals among Tertiary coals, carbon dredged from the ocean, dug from the frozen world, and innumerable other objections over which they can not climb, the vegetation theory can not be true.
ANNULAR DOWNFALL IN THE TERTIARY OCEAN OF THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE.
If the Vailian theory claims are valid the beds in the Rocky Mountain Tertiary must present the following features: The Cretaceous period having been brought to a close by a down-rush of waters and snows in the northern hemisphere, a stream of water pouring southward must to a great extent have been a fresh-water current, and those deposits in the extreme northern beds of the Rocky Mountain region must be largely fresh-water accumulations. Those in the middle of this region must be to a less extent fresh-water; perhaps sometimes fresh and again marine, owing to changes in currents, etc., and the two be commingled, while in the southern part the beds must be almost exclusively marine. Fortunately for the Vailian theory these demands are fully met. The waters of this vast region communicated with the Arctic ocean, probably by way of the present depression in British America, along the valley of the McKenzie river, while south it communicated with the Gulf of Mexico.
Here was a sea forty times larger than Lake Erie. Where did the water come from that made the northern part fresh, the middle part brackish and the southern portion marine? The Tertiary of the Pacific Coast is marine; so is a larger portion of the Atlantic border. Doubtless Davis Strait poured a volume of fresh-water from the polar world into the Atlantic, for there is the same commingling of marine and fresh-water shells on the northeast coast, while in the northern part they are exclusively fresh-water species. Rivers could not have done this, for all the rivers from Delaware Bay around the coast of the Gulf of Mexico were not sufficient to lay down fresh-water Tertiary. Admit that the vast polar ocean of the Tertiary period was a body of fresh-water, and all difficulties disappear.
Geologists admit that in the Tertiary period mountains were made on every continent, that there was a world-wide disturbance of strata, and the most complete extermination of species on record. The Cretaceous world was swept by a mighty cataclysmic wave, and its animals were buried in the detrital mass swept from the land into the seas and formed the lower Eocene beds. Nothing of which we can conceive could do this but a downpour of Annular waters. One-third of North America, a great part of Northern Europe, nearly all of Siberia, much of China, and other parts of Asia were apparently synchronously submerged beneath fresh-water.