LVELL. 333 



He kept steadily at work preparing his American 

 travels for publication, and in a note to a friend 

 regarding the nature of coal, he instanced the swamps 

 of Virginia. " The Virginian morasses allow, under 

 a hot sun, great accumulations of black vegetable 

 matter, nearly like peat, and which might make 

 coal. The shade of Cupresstis distichi, Thuya, and 

 water oaks shut out the sun, and ferns and mosses 

 draw in the damp air beneath, while the heat causes 

 evaporation, and evaporation cold. One swamp 

 which I saw is forty miles long by twenty broad. 

 Thousands of prostrate trees are in the peat." 

 Some investigators held that the atmosphere must 

 have contained a large amount of carbonic acid 

 gas during the ages in which coal was being formed 

 out of decaying vegetation, but Lyell, adhering to 

 his strictly uniform itarian views, denied this, and 

 considered the Virginian swamps to be explanatory 

 of the formation of coal. 



Lyell went to see the skeleton, brought by a 

 German named Koch from the Missouri, of a very 

 large mastodon, and was wonderfully amused to 

 notice how this savant had made it up out of frag- 

 ments. " He has turned the huge tusks the wrong 

 way — horizontally, has made the first pair of ribs 

 into collar-bones, and has intercalated several 

 spurious dorsal and tail vertebrae, and has placed 

 the toe-bones wrong to prove, what he really 

 believes, that it was web-footed. I think he is a 

 mixture of an enthusiast and an impostor, but more 

 of the former, and amusingly ignorant. His mode 



