THE FORMATION OF COAL. 1ST 



which signify the river sands of Laerdal, Sundal, etc. These 

 deposits stretch out into the fiord, forming extensive shallows 

 that are steadily growing and advancing further and further 

 into the fiord. One of the most remarkable examples of such 

 deposits is that brought by the Storelv (or Justedals Elv), 

 which flows down the Justedal, receiving the outpour from its 

 glaciers, and terminates at Marifjoren. When bathing here I 

 found an extensive sub-aqueous plain stretching fairly across 

 that branch of the Lyster fiord into which the Storelv flows. 

 The waters of the fiord are whitened to a distance of two or 

 three miles beyond the mouth of the river. These deposits 

 must, if the present conditions last long enough, finally extend 

 to the body, and even to the mouth of the fiords, and thus 

 cover the whole of the bottom vegetable bed with a stratified 

 rock in which will be entombed, and well preserved, isolated 

 specimens of the trees and other vegetable forms corresponding 

 to those accumulated in a thick bed below, but which have 

 been lying so long in the clear waters that they have become 

 soddened into homogeneous vegetable pulp or mud, only 

 requiring the pressure of solid superstratum to convert them 

 into coal. 



The specimens of trees in the upper rock, I need scarcely 

 add, would be derived from the same drifting as that which 

 produced the lower pulp ; but these coming into the water at 

 the period of its turbidity and of the rapid deposition of 

 mineral matter, would be sealed up one by one as the mineral 

 particles surrounding it subsided. Fossils of estuarine animals 

 would, of course, accompany these, or of fresh-water animals 

 where, instead of a fjord, the scene of these proceedings is an 

 inland lake. In reference to this I may state that at the inner 

 extremities of the larger Norwegian fiords the salinity of the 

 water is so slight that it is imperceptible to taste. I have freely 

 quenched my thirst with the water of the Sorfjord, the great 

 inner branch of the Hardanger, where pallid specimens of 

 bladder wrack were growing on its banks. 



In the foregoing matter-of-fact picture of what is proceed- 

 ing on a small scale in the Aachensee, and on a larger in 

 Norway, we have, 1 think, a natural history of the formation, 

 not only of coal seams, but also of the Coal Measures around 

 and above them. 



The theory which attributed our coal seams to such vegetable 

 accumulations as the rafts of the Mississippi is now generally 

 abandoned. It fails to account for the state of preservation 



