PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES. 333 



Other members of the coal-series are so prolific. The aluminous and 

 ferruginous shales (the mud of the coal-formation) appear to have 

 been more favourable to their conservation than the sandy deposits. 

 _ Now from these vegetable relics the associates and contempora- 

 ries of our fossil fruit (meagre as is the collection) do we not gather 

 important information as to the state of things then existing on the 

 surface of the earth ! Is it possible to resist the cumulative evidence 

 which we have here of the high temperature of the earth and the 

 air at that early period in these latitudes? 



It would be idle to assert that these enormous accumulations of 

 vegetable debris extending over a surface of many hundred square 

 miles, were floated into these northern regions by ocean-currents 

 from their native soil and climate. Masses of timber and other re- 

 lics borne upon the waves and wafted by the breezes of the Atlan- 

 tic, will sometimes travel to a vast distance, and thus the produc- 

 tions of the West India islands have been known to reach our 

 shores; but the relics under review are not of these vagrant character. 

 The plants exhumed from the coal formation lived and died in the 

 neighbourhood where they are buried. They flourished and perished 

 (if immutable forms like these can be said ever to have perished) in 

 their maturity, uprooted by the torrent and enclosed in the mud of 

 a lake or estuarj', or the sand of a sea, ere their fragile stems could 

 decompose or the living fruit had time to germinate. And this pro- 

 cess going on throughout a long succession of unaccounted ages (so 

 long and so vast indeed that we are lost in the contemplation of the 

 phenomena which constitute their chronology) produced among 

 others the coal.formation, which alone is sometimes as in the locality 

 to which these specimens belong, 2000 feet in thickness, whilst 

 every member of the series is complete in its fossil character and 

 identity. 



Whether these enormous deposits were the effect of river-currents, 

 and flood.s, and the quiet alternations of sea and land such as we 

 witness in existin- nature, or the effect of violent and hostile inroads 

 of old ocean upon terra Jirma, we are not in possession of sufficient 

 data to determine, but the active agency of water, " water every- 

 where," is manifest in these vast accumulations. The regularity of 

 the strata has been .sometimes disturbed by the ejection of molten 

 rock from beneath, and occasionally, as in 'the instance of the coal- 

 formation under consideration, the whole series has slid down per- 

 haps a thousand feet, the base of the mass having been displaced by 

 some disturbance below in what Sedgwick calls Pluto's kitchen, but 

 to Neptune and his fraternity, the river gods, we owe exclusively 

 the construction of our coal-fields. And yet how few of the spoils 

 of either are discoverable ! A single bed of shells, perhaps a few 

 inches in thickness, or a solitary skeleton of a fish may be the only 

 vestige of tlic watery domain throughout an extensive coal-field. 

 1 he genera! absence of marine and fluviatile remains from this for- 

 mation is indeed remarkable. We know that the water was not 

 destitute of these organized beings, for at anterior, and subsequent 



