ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. 179 



how difficult to conceive, how extremely improbable in such circum- 

 stances, is the preservation of delicate plants, spread out with the 

 most perfect arrangement of their parts, uninjured by the rude ac- 

 tion of rapid streams and currents carrying gravel and sand, and 

 branches and trunks of trees. 



In the theory which accounts for the formation of beds of coal 

 by supposing that they are the remains of trees and other plants 

 that grew on the spot where the coal now exists, that the land was 

 submerged to admit of the covering of sandstones or shale being 

 deposited, and again elevated so that the sandstone or shale might 

 become the subsoil of a new growth, to be again submerged, and 

 this process repeated as often as there are seams of coal in the series 

 — these are demands on our assent of a most startling kind. In the 

 sections above examined, we have eighty-four seams of coal in the 

 one, and seventy-six in the other. In the Saarbriick coal-field there 

 are 1 20 seams, without taking into account the thinner seams, those 

 less than a foot thick*. The materials of each of these seams, how- 

 ever thin (and there are some not an inch thick, lying upon and 

 covered by great depths of sandstones and shales), must, according 

 to this theory, have grown on land, and the covering of each must 

 have been deposited under water. There must thus have been an 

 equal number of successive upward and downward movements, and 

 these so gentle, such soft heavings, as not to break the continuity 

 or disturb the parallelism of horizontal lines spread over hun- 

 dreds of square miles ; and the movements must, moreover, have 

 been so nicely adjusted, that they should always be downward when 

 a layer of vegetable matter was to be covered up ; and in the up- 

 ward movements, the motion must always have ceased so soon as the 

 last layers of sand or shale had reached the surface, to be immedi- 

 ately covered by the fresh vegetable growth ; for otherwise we should 

 have found evidence, in the series of successive deposits, of some 

 being furrowed, broken up, or covered with pebbles or other detrital 

 matter of land, long exposed to the waves breaking on a shore, and 

 to meteoric agencies. These conditions, which seem to be insepa- 

 rable from the theory in question, it would be difficult to find anj'^- 

 thing analogous to in any other case of changes in the relative level 

 of sea and land with which we are acquainted. 



That some seams of coal were formed of vegetable matter that 

 grew on the spot where the coal now exists, seems to be proved in 

 several cases (such, for instance, as that of the Bolton railway sec- 

 tion) beyond dispute ; and that some seams afford proofs of having 

 been formed by drifted vegetable matter may be true. The coal- 

 seams and the beds associated with them could be formed in no 

 other way than under water ; and the accumulation of the vegetable 

 matter near the surface of it, and a very gradual submergence of 

 the land, arrested at unequal intervals, appear to be the conditions 

 most reconcileable with the phaenomena. This implies, however, 

 a deposition of the alternating sandstones and sliales in very shallow 



* Humboldt's Kosmos, p. 295. 



n2 



