Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1862-06-19
HOW COAL is FORMED.


The land on which coal plants grew has pas
sed away no human eye will see their like
again-no human eye saw them, no human
hand touched leaf Of these gigantic trees and
ferns. No mner's art ever portrayed those
dense forests, nor surveyors pen mapped down
the broad estates on which they rankly grew.
But certainly as the rays of light tell us of
burning metals in the sun, so will the segrega-
ton of the earthly particles into which their
long and creeping roots penetrated the bed
ding of the grains of sand and clay which init
mately covered them up, tells US the story of
the ancient physical condition, under whose life
less trunks and leaves and boughs became con-
verified into coal.
Low were those ancient lands, surrounded by
marsh swamps, bounded by shallow estuaries,
up which salt sea water gently rose and fell,
one can scarcely speak OF tide, so smoothly be-
tween the stems and underground of water
loving tree it rushed, and through the tangled
Jungle it sluggishly flowed. Into the muddy
waters of estuary and lakes, and on the oozy
ground around, the leaves fell year by year, as
autumy chills unclothed the trees. AS the
trees too, in the roll of time, rotted at their
bases by the watery medium in which they grew,
toppled over, and became immersed in the bog
gy soil under surface consisting of ferns and
number plants, mixed with MOSES the rank
heritage ever growing, rotting, and fermenting.
Green and verdant at the top, dark, black,
heated and distilng out from the decaying
vegetable matter, globules Of bitumen below, to
mingle with and penetrate the half-rotted close
ly matted mass of leaves and fibers, and of
porous wood. Thus was the coal-seam formed
1t was not open to the day until it had dried
into the turf or rotted into soil. But it was
covered up at a certain stage of its elaboration,
and so preserved for the human use.
1t may have completed in the earth the pro-
cess of its conversion into coal but it was orig-
naly the produce of the debris of living veg
citation buried under covering of mud. The
accumulation might have long been going on
near the surface, bitumen secreting below
going on for ages before the mass was buried
in. Covered in at last strata of mud and
sand are piled over it, the weight of the super
incumbent materials pressed down the spongy
fbrous upper part of the future coal-seam into
the bitumiuous lower portion, the semi-huid
bitumen is squeezed upwards amongst the COM
pressed fbers. and forced into the pores of the
wood, the thickness of the vegetable bed is re-
duced, and it becomes an almost solid mass oil
wood and vegetable fibre, impregnated with the
bitumen distilled from itself. If it had parted
with its gases and btumen before it had been
covered in it might have become fossil peat.
But coal the produce would Fever have been.
Briefly, then, such was the origin of coal.
This view of the matter excludes at once the
unthracites from any right to the term of coal
Next, 10 dispose of the lignities. Lgnities
may or may not at some future time-ages to
come-be converted into coal They are not
coal yet they are still ligneous.
The wood structure is so well preserved in
the brown coal of Switzerland and Germany
that in some places ii is used for raiters beams
and other building purposes. The stages of
elaboration are not yet complete, which are
requisite for the production of coal. 1t is the
babe not the man. Anthracite has lost its BIZ
tumen. 1t is the corpse. 1t might have been
coal once, it is less now. Shale is the earth
on which the corpse was laid. 1t may be sat
urated with its blood, but it is not the body.