338 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1904. 



They were inhabitants of the same age, enjoyed similar bounties, the same cli- 

 mate, and were companions at a period when the waters of the sea were as warm as 

 those of the present tropical oceans; a fact easily proved by their organization and 

 the beauty and delicacy of their shelly coverings. The corals, coraline sponges, and 

 other vegetable productions of that period, although bearing a striking resemblance 

 to those now nourishing in submarine situations, have nevertheless some peculiar 

 characteristic features, distinguishing them from species of the same classes now 

 inhabiting our shores, although their lineal descendants have long since passed away. 



Gesner was an extreme catastrophist, and his ideas concerning the 

 origin of the drift, as well as that of coal, were formulated more or less 

 by the scriptural account of the flood. Discussing the fragments of 

 slate and the masses of quartz rock and granite that were found scat- 

 tered over the surface of the Red Sandstone, and even entering into 

 its composition at great depth, he argued that their shape demonstrated 

 that they had been transported by the efforts of mighty currents. 

 From this fact he conceived that similar causes had operated upon the 

 surface of the earth at separate and distinct periods of time, one period 

 having produced the ingredients of the newer rocks, which in their 

 turn had been evidently denuded by the rapidity of overwhelming 

 floods. He thought it probable that the first great catastrophe arose 

 when the earth emerged from beneath the waters at its first creation, 

 before which darkness was upon the face of the deep, and that it was 

 not improbable that another geological event may have produced 

 another class of phenomena at that period when the "windows of 

 heaven were opened and the fountains of the great deep broken up." 



The giant bowlders, sometimes found on the very hilltops, he recog- 

 nized as erratics, but could not believe them to be due to flood action. 

 ""They have doubtless been thrown upwards," he wrote, "and left 

 cresting the highest ridges, by volcanic explosions that have taken 

 place since the general inundation of our planet." The general phe- 

 nomena of the drift, however, he regarded as almost certainly the effect 

 "of an overwhelming deluge which at a former period produced those 

 results now so manifest upon the earth. Not only hath the granite 

 sent its heralds abroad, large blocks of trap are also scattered over 

 the soil of Nova Scotia far from their original and former stations." 



That coal is of organic origin he recognized, though as to the man- 

 ner of its accumulation he was somewhat in doubt. He assumed that 

 a part of it at least ma} r have collected at the bottom of the sea, 

 together with successive layers of sand and clay, and that the beds had 

 since been uplifted by volcanic forces. The method of conversion of 

 the organic matter into coal, he thought, might also have been brought 

 about through the intervention of volcanic forces. 



In discussing the changes which have taken place on the surface of 

 the earth, he queried if such might not 



have been produced between that period when the globe was first created and the 

 Noachian deluge, and might not many of those effects, the causes of which are now 



