10 ILLINOIS STATE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY CIRCULAR 480 



Noe' had a considerable interest and acquaintance with coal and coal mining. 

 During part of the '20s he usually worked for the Illinois Survey during 

 the summer, and with a Survey driver, for he did not drive a car himself, 

 Noe would make the rounds of the coal company field offices in the state, 

 dispensing good will and advice, and bringing back any available collec- 

 tions of coal balls and plant fossils to Chicago for his students to work 

 on. I think he was truly an ambassador of good will between the coal oper- 

 ators and the Illinois Survey. They were all good friends of Professor Noe. 



Noe joined organizations such as the American Institute of Mining and 

 Metallurgical Engineers and the Illinois Mining Institute to be in closer contact 

 with coal operators and obtain their cooperation in collecting fossils and paleo- 

 botanical data. He was very much at ease in groups and especially enjoyed the 

 annual meeting and boat trip of the Illinois Mining Institute. 



According to Schopf: 



For a couple of years during this period of the '20s Noe also was an ad- 

 visor of the Allen and Garcia Coal Commission that studied and made recom- 

 mendations to the Soviet Government about coal mining practices in the 

 Donetz Basin in Russia. He wrote a small book about his experiences, called 

 "Golden Days of Soviet Russia" [Noe, 193 id]. 



As a result of his interest in coal mining, Noe made arrangements to trans- 

 late and revise Otto Stutzer's book, Kohle . He believed that the translation would 

 be his major contribution. It was a formidable undertaking, but it was essentially 

 complete at the time of his death in 1939 . Dr. Gilbert H. Cady of the Illinois Ge- 

 ological Survey was asked to complete the manuscript and bring it up to date for 

 publication by the University of Chicago Press. Cady' s instructions from the pub- 

 lisher were to introduce no revisions that had not been in Noe's manuscript, so 

 Cady's part of it is a direct translation of the German. Nonetheless, it took him 

 several months to complete, working before and after his regular working hours. 

 The book appeared in 1940 as " Geology of Coal, by Otto Stutzer, translated and 

 revised by Adolph Noe. " 



Discovery of American Coal Balls 



Coal balls are masses of fossilized peat that are found in coal seams. 

 These peat masses escaped the coalification process that transformed the sur- 

 rounding material, and the plant structures in many are well preserved. 



Coal balls were first reported in England by Hooker and Binney in 1855, 

 about the same time that the first collections of plant impressions were being made 

 in the Mazon Creek area (Darrah, 1969). They were called coal balls because 

 they came exclusively from the coal seam and had a crustal covering of coal; in- 

 deed, many of the European specimens were quite rounded and ball-like. The 

 term "coal ball, " however, is not particularly appropriate because they are not com- 

 posed of coal, and American coal balls vary considerably in shape and size, from 

 tiny spheres to gigantic masses of many tons. They have curved surfaces and 

 many are somewhat flattened, biconvex, or lenticular. However, they have no 

 single characteristic shape. 



Although coal balls had subsequently been found in other parts of Europe, 

 including Russia (Zalessky, 1910), none had been reported in America at the time 

 Noe became interested in them. Noe' was convinced there must be American coal 

 balls and suggested why they had not been found: 



