614 STEVENSON— FORMATION OF COAL BEDS. [November 3. 



of so great a mass, almost impermeable to water after having be- 

 come thoroughly air-dried. But a priori reasoning is unnecessary ; 

 for, as Lesquereux recognized long ago, burial of peat bogs is part 

 of the normal sequence of events. 



Dawson^-" has described an early Quaternary bog which he saw 

 in Nova Scotia. It underlies 20 feet of bowlder clay and pressure 

 has made the peat almost as hard as coal, though it is tougher and 

 more earthy than good coal. When rubbed or scratched with a 

 knife, it becomes glossy; it burns with considerable flame and ap- 

 proaches the brown coals or poorer varieties of bituminous coal. 

 It contains many roots and branches of trees apparently related to 

 spruce. 



Areas of peat buried under glacial drift are numerous in the 

 New England states as well as in New Jersey and some of them will 

 be mentioned in a succeeding section. Newberry,^^" many years ago, 

 collected all the observations then available for states west from the 

 Alleghany mountains. In Montgomery county of Ohio, E. Orton 

 found a bed of peat, 15 to 20 feet thick, the surface covered with 

 Sphagnuvi, grasses and sedges. It contains coniferous wood with 

 bones of elephant, mastodon and teeth of giant beaver ; and it under- 

 lies 90 feet of gravel and sand. At many places in Highland county 

 of the same state, wells have reached a stratum of vegetable matter 

 and, at Cleveland, a " carbonaceous stratum " has been found at 20 

 feet below the surface. A similar condition exists at Lawrenceburg, 

 Indiana, as well as at many places along the Ohio ; and J. Collett 

 reported that, throughout southwestern Indiana, there is an ancient 

 soil, 2 to 20 feet thick, with peat, muck, rooted stumps, branches and 

 leaves, at 60 to 120 feet below the surface. This deposit is known 

 locally as " Noah's cattle yards." The same condition is reported 

 from a portion of Illinois. The great forest bed of Iowa, discov- 

 ered by McGee at a later time, is in part a buried bog. Leverett, 

 Taylor, and Goldthwait have described autochthonous peat bogs 

 buried under glacial drift at many localities within the Missis- 

 sippi area. 



'"° J. W. Dawson, " Acadian Geology," 2d Ed., London, 1868, p. 63. 

 '" J. S. Newberry, " Surface Geology of Ohio," Geol. Survey of Ohio, 

 1874, Vol. IT., pp. 30-32. 



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