DEVELOPMENT OF PALEOBOTANY IN THE ILLINOIS BASIN 13 



to ask why, in America, they did not study the Carboniferous flora as pre- 

 served in coal balls. David White replied that there were no coal balls to 

 be found in American coal. And Dr. Noe again, "But you have coal mines, do 

 you not?" Whereupon David White reiterated with some asperity, "We have 

 looked for them and there are no coal balls in American coal." Dr. J. M. 

 Coulter and Dr. T. C. Chamberlin hastily brought to an end this turn of the 

 discussion. Later, however, they went to Dr. Noe and asked him for an ex- 

 planation of his comments. Did he believe there were coal balls in America, 

 and if so, did he think he could find them? 



Noe" soon substantiated his view with the recognition of an American coal 

 ball, although there is some confusion in his writings as to which coal ball ac- 

 tually was the first. One can imagine his delight, however, when he related 

 (Noe, 1932, p. 317): 



In Autumn, 1922, I wrote a letter to Dr. David White informing him that 

 coal balls had recently been found in Illinois, and at a conference during 

 the Christmas vacation of the same year, I showed a sectioned coal ball to 

 him.... In December 1929, Dr. David White showed me some concretions taken 

 out of a coal seam in 1910 which undoubtedly can be called coal balls, but 

 which were not recognized as such at the time. 



Noe's announcement of the discovery of the first coal balls from the Illi- 

 nois Basin appeared in Science (Noe*, 1923a). A second paper (Noe, 1923b), on 

 the flora of the Western Kentucky coal field, he heavily slanted toward informing 

 people about and interesting them in what he was searching for— coal balls. 

 Although he illustrated a number of Pennsylvanian compression- impression speci- 

 mens from Kentucky and Illinois, the first figure was of an uncut coal ball, about 

 which he wrote, "The first discovery of a real American coal ball occurred 

 in Mine No. 12 of the West Kentucky Coal Company near Sturgis, Kentucky. The 

 coal ball. . .is unusually large compared with European material and promises to 

 give valuable information when it will be cut. " He also included three photo- 

 graphs of anatomical sections of plants from English coal balls. 



Later, apparently in contradiction of his Kentucky paper, Noe (1932) re- 

 lated that Gilbert Cady had collected the first coal ball in Illinois in 1922 at the 

 O'Gara No. 9 Mine near Harrisburg. Cady saw in it enough plant material to 

 suspect its importance. It was shown to Noe by Dr. Harold E. Culver, then 

 Head of the Coal Section of the Illinois Geological Survey, and Noe' recognized 

 it as a coal ball. Noe stated, "This was the first known coal ball found in North 

 America and recognized as such. " 



Although not paleobotanists, Culver and Cady, who succeeded Culver as 

 Head of the Illinois Survey's Coal Section, encouraged all aspects of paleobo- 

 tanical research in the Illinois Basin for many years. 



The O'Gara Mine coal ball from the Harrisburg (No. 5) Coal Member trig- 

 gered the growth of a new branch of Pennsylvanian paleobotany in the United 

 States. Noe at a meeting in Pittsburgh spoke of his coal-ball collecting at the 

 O'Gara Mine: 



In Harrisburg they were found in a mine which had been abandoned. The mine 

 had been shut down for about two years and it was rather hard to get to the 

 coal balls. I had my assistant, a mining engineer of the O'Gara Company, 

 and a foreman with me and we had to climb about ^25 feet down the air 

 shaft. I dreaded the idea of carrying the balls up because we had collected 

 over 500 pounds. I could have gotten 5 000 pounds. We let a rope down in the 

 shaft and had one man stay underground. He filled our knapsacks and tied 



