216 Coal in Canada. 



except a small district in Gaspe — rests on rocks older than the car- 

 boniferous system. This great general fact is a most important 

 one practically, and has already saved much ruinous expenditure. 

 It is a fact to he insisted on with this view ; and has been so in- 

 sisted on by the head of the Survey ; but he has not overstepped the 

 bounds of certainty in the matter, and has in each case of sup- 

 posed coal discovery, stated merely the facts and principles bearing 

 on that case, without indulging in rash general statements. We 

 may take for example, and as a further illustration of the subject, 

 the following from the report of 1849-50. It refers to the sup- 

 posed discovery of coal at Bay St. Paul and Murray Bay. 



" Wherever workable seams of coal have yet been found on the 

 face of the globe, the evidences connected with them prove 

 beyond a doubt, that their origin is due to great accumulations 

 of vegetable matter, which has been converted into a mineral 

 condition. The vegetable structure is detected in the mineral 

 by microscopic examination, and as might be expected, the strata 

 associated with coal beds are profusely stored with fossil plants ; 

 even where the seams are too thin to be workable, or so thin as 

 to be readily passed over without great attention, the vegetable 

 remains disseminated in the masses of rock dividino- the seams 

 are still in vast abundance. In the section of the Nova Scotia 

 coal rocks, at the Joggins, for example, as detailed in the report 

 transmitted to the Government in 1844, it will be found that in a 

 thickness approaching 15,000 feet, seventy-six coal seams occur 

 with a total thickness of no more than forty-four feet, and that 

 for thousands of feet in some parts, nO coal seam is met with 

 over three inches ; there are yet comparatively few layers of 

 the rock that are wholly free from vegetable remains, and the 

 substance of these remains, however thin the leaf or small the 

 fragment, being generally converted into coal, the mineral — from 

 the multitude of grains of it disseminated through great thick- 

 nesses of the strata — frequently gives a peculiar character to the 

 stone as one of its constituents. The same thing is observable in 

 other carboniferous localities, both in America and Europe, and it 

 appears quite reasonable-to suppose, that if coal seams were dis- 

 covered of an older date than those which constitute the present 

 known great magazines of fossil fuel, the vegetable growth that 

 would be required to give them an approach to a workable thick- 

 ness, would afford the means of an extensive distribution of re- 

 mains in the strata with which they were associated. The forma- 



