8 PROCEEDINGS COTTESWOLD CLUB I9OI 
In 1811 was published a highly interesting three- 
volume book, entitled The Organic Remains of a Former 
World, by James Parkinson. The author states fully the 
geological beliefs at the commencement of the nineteenth 
century. He accepts the vegetable origin of coal, and the 
process of deposition of the several seams is ascribed to 
the Mosaic flood. The writer is, however, puzzled by 
the occurrence of beds of limestone, and candidly admits 
that “ considerable difficulties still oppose the satisfactory 
explanation of these phenomena.” 
Buffon’ considered that coal was formed from both 
animal and vegetable substances, the oil and fat of which 
had been converted into bitumen by the action of acid. 
Dr. Hutton, in his Zheory of the Earth, published in 
1795, recognised the vegetable origin of coal, which he 
considered assumed the mineral condition by reason of 
distillation of the volatile properties of the vegetable mass 
by the action of subterranean heat. He says :—‘ There 
is, perhaps, no one substance in the mineral kingdom by 
which the operation of subterranean heat is, to common 
understanding, better exemplified than that of mineral coal. 
These strata are evidently a deposit of inflammable sub- 
stance which all came originally from vegetable bodies.” 
We now know that. coal, as distinct from lignite, is 
confined to one period of the earth’s history: this is the 
Carboniferous. 
What were the conditions which existed at the com- 
paratively early period of the Earth’s history when the 
Carboniferous Coal Measures were deposited ? 
Taking the West of England there was, first, a sea, 
probably over the whole area. This we know by the 
occurrence of a thick limestone deposit, chiefly built up 
of the calcareous remains of marine organisms. Towards 
1 Hist. Nat. des Minéraux, Tome 1, p, 429, 4me. Edit. Referred to by Playfair. 
“Tllustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth,” p. 148; 1802. 
