280 Baron Humboldt on Gas Springs. 



to certain parts of Europe. They are abundant In the British 

 Isles, in Belgium, in France, on the Lower Rhine, and in 

 Upper Silesia. In the same primeval times of all-pervading 

 volcanic action, too, must those enormous quantities of carbo- 

 naceous matter have issued from the bowels of the earth, which 

 all the limestone rocks contain, and which, separated from 

 oxygen, and reprcsentetl in the solid form, composes about an 

 eighth part of the absolute bulk of those mountain masses. 

 The carbonic acid which the atmosphere still contained, and 

 which was not absorbed by the alkaline earths, was gradually 

 consumed by the vegetation of the primeval world ; so that 

 the atmosphere, purified by the processes of vegetable life, 

 by and by contained no more of the gas than was uninjuiious 

 to the organization of such animals as people the earth at the 

 present time. Sulphurous or sulphuric acid vapours, too, 

 occurring more frequently, and much more abundantly, then 

 than now, occasioned the destruction of the inhabitants of the 

 inland >vaters — mollusca and numerous genera of fishes, as 

 well as the formation of the strangely contorted beds of gypsum, 

 w^hich have often, apparently, been shalvcn by earthquakes. 



Under precisely similar physical relations, there were fiir- 

 ther thrown ovit from the bosom of the earth various gases 

 and liquids, mud, and, from the eruption cones of volcanoes, 

 which are but a species of intermitting springs, streams of 



rivers feed the same ocean with carbonic acid and lime ; but we have no 

 reason to infer, that when mountain masses of calcareous rock, have thus 

 been graduall^^ formed in the sea, any essential change in the chemical 

 composition of its waters has been brought about. We have no accu- 

 rate data, as yet, for measuring, whether in our own time, or at any 

 remote geological era, the relative supply and consumption of carbon in 

 the air or the ocean, causes the amount of those elements to vary greatly ; 

 but the variation, if admitted, would not have caused an excess, but 

 rather a deficit, of carbon, in the periods most productive of coal or peat, 

 as compared to an}- subsequent or antecedent epochs. In fact, a climate 

 favouring the rank and luxurious growth of plants, and, at the same 

 time, checking their de.jaj', and giving rise to peat or accumulations of 

 vegetable matter, might, for the time, diminish the average amount of 

 carbonic acid in the atmosphere — a state of things precisely the reverse 

 of that assumed by those to whose views I am now objecting. — Travels 

 in North Americt. By Charles Lyell. Vol. i., p. 1.50. — Edit, of Phil, 

 Joiirii't'. 



