a ae een li 
eae pee eS a a ee ae 
SNE Ee a ED ah eet ee ee LS 
— 
L. Lesquereux on the Coal Formations of North Americas 23 
An author, speaking lately of the formation of the coal, men- 
tions the presence in the coal of wedge-shaped masses of vascular 
tissues found imbedded in the midst of the more structureless bitumin- 
ous matter of the coal. He accounts for this fact by supposing 
that these tissues are the remains of floated logs, which have 
finally become imbedded in the carbonaceous matter below. This 
supposition is rather an extraordinary one. If the coal has been 
formed like the peat bogs, there can not be any floated logs in the 
compound. If there were floated logs in the coal, this would 
take us back to the formation of the coal by transportation. In 
every peat bog, the process of burying trees is in constant opera- 
tion. e preservation of the logs which cannot be covered 
with water when they fall on the ground, is due to the a sage? 
of a moss, the sphagnum which extends its compact tufts - 
ways saturated with water like a sponge, over every fragment 
of wood, from the smallest to the largest. The Sphagna work 
like the ants to bury their treasures; and as their growth is con- 
tinuous and —— only by the frost, the heaping of their own 
woody matter which forms the structureless peat added to the 
wood which they have to preserve and the other plants of the 
marshes gives an appreciable thickness for each year. In the 
peat bogs of Switzerland, peat grows at the rate of two inches 
per year, a thickness reduced to one half by compression. In 
the same peat bogs, the poy is do not require more than th 
years to cover the stem of a tree of moderate thickness. 
The bogs then, even the largest, enter naturally and without 
transportation into the composition of the coal as they become 
art of the matter of the peat bogs. In the deep bogs of New 
ersey, there is a class of woodmen whom I peo call log-fishers, 
who sound the marshes with long poles, to find the sound } 
which they dig out of the black and already combustible mould 
or _ from a depth of from six to ten feet. Some old swamps 
of Northern Europe contain as many as four or five generations 
of trees of different kinds imbedded from twenty to fifty feet 
deep and separated by thick beds of compact, entirely decom- 
woody matter or peat. Some of those bogs are so abund- 
antly filled with sound and large logs of oaks, pines and birches, 
that their removal has gone on for more than'half a century 
before there was any material diminution of the supply, and for 
a long time it was supposed and even maintained that the trees 
of those marshes were growing under ground. 
The flattening of all the stems found in the coal and in its 
shales, and also the layers of bark observed in the same forma- 
tions, without any trace of internal woody structure, have also 
attracted a great deal of attention and useless theoretical discus- 
sion. In the oldest peat bogs of Germany, especially in the 
large swamps or lignite-deposits of the Pliocene of Saxony, the 
